Classification of Paediatric Pneumonia Using Modified DenseNet-121 Deep-Learning Model

Abstract

There is a substantial worldwide effect, both in terms of disease and death, that is caused by pediatric pneumonia, which is a disorder that affects children under the age of five. Even while Streptococcus pneumoniae is the most prevalent agent responsible for this sickness, it may also be brought on by other bacteria, viruses, or fungi. An efficient approach utilizing deep-learning methods to forecast pediatric pneumonia reliably using chest X-ray images has been developed. The current study presents an updated version of the DenseNet-121 deep-learning model developed for identifying scans of pediatric pneumonia. The batch normalization, maximum pooling, and dropout layers introduced into the standard model were done so to improve its accuracy. The activations of the preceding layers are scaled and normalized using batch normalization, leading to a mean value of zero and a variance of one. This helps decrease internal variability during training, which speeds up the training process, promotes model stability, and improves the model's overall capacity to generalize. Max pooling is a beneficial technique for reducing the number of model parameters, making the model more computationally effective. Meanwhile, dropout is a preventative measure against overfitting by decreasing the co-dependence of neurons. As a result, the network acquires more durable and adaptive features. Classifying instances of pediatric pneumonia with the help of the proposed model resulted in an exceptional accuracy rate of 97.03%.