V. S. Ananthanarayana

Peer-reviewed journal on social and business aspects of informatics that covers the theory and application of enterprise information systems, as well as interactions between ICT and people.

Pulmonary disease is a commonly occurring abnormality throughout this world. The pulmonary diseases include Tuberculosis, Pneumothorax, Cardiomegaly, Pulmonary atelectasis, Pneumonia, etc. A timely prognosis of pulmonary disease is essential. Increasing progress in Deep Learning (DL) techniques has significantly impacted and contributed to the medical domain, specifically in leveraging medical imaging for analysis, prognosis, and therapeutic decisions for clinicians. Many contemporary DL strategies for radiology focus on a single modality of data utilizing imaging features without considering the clinical context that provides more valuable complementary information for clinically consistent prognostic decisions. Also, the selection of the best data fusion strategy is crucial when performing Machine Learning (ML) or DL operation on multimodal heterogeneous data. We investigated multimodal medical fusion strategies leveraging DL techniques to predict pulmonary abnormality from the heterogeneous radiology Chest X-Rays (CXRs) and clinical text reports. In this research, we have proposed two effective unimodal and multimodal subnetworks to predict pulmonary abnormality from the CXR and clinical reports. We have conducted a comprehensive analysis and compared the performance of unimodal and multimodal models. The proposed models were applied to standard augmented data and the synthetic data generated to check the model’s ability to predict from the new and unseen data. The proposed models were thoroughly assessed and examined against the publicly available Indiana university dataset and the data collected from the private medical hospital. The proposed multimodal models have given superior results compared to the unimodal models.

Peer-reviewed journal on social and business aspects of informatics that covers the theory and application of enterprise information systems, as well as interactions between ICT and people.

Pulmonary diseases are life-threatening diseases commonly observed worldwide, and timely diagnosis of these diseases is essential. Meanwhile, increased use of Convolution Neural Networks has promoted the advancement of computer-assisted clinical recommendation systems for diagnosing diseases using chest radiographs. The texture and shape of the tissues in the diagnostic images are essential aspects of prognosis. Therefore, in the latest studies, the vast set of images with a larger resolution is paired with deep learning techniques to enhance the performance of the disease diagnosis in chest radiographs. Moreover, pulmonary diseases have irregular and different sizes; therefore, several studies sought to add new components to existing deep learning techniques for acquiring multi-scale imaging features from diagnostic chest X-rays. However, most of the attempts do not consider the computation overhead and lose the spatial details in an effort to capture the larger receptive field for obtaining the discriminative features from high-resolution chest X-rays. In this paper, we propose an explainable and lightweight Multi-Scale Chest X-ray Network (MS-CheXNet) to predict abnormal diseases from the diagnostic chest X-rays. The MS-CheXNet consists of four following main subnetworks: (1) Multi-Scale Dilation Layer (MSDL), which includes multiple and stacked dilation convolution channels that consider the larger receptive field and captures the variable sizes of pulmonary diseases by obtaining more discriminative spatial features from the input chest X-rays; (2) Depthwise Separable Convolution Neural Network (DS-CNN) is used to learn imaging features by adjusting lesser parameters compared to the conventional CNN, making the overall network lightweight and computationally inexpensive, making it suitable for mobile vision tasks; (3) a fully connected Deep Neural Network module is used for predicting abnormalities from the chest X-rays; and (4) Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) technique is employed to check the decision models’ transparency and understand their ability to arrive at a decision by visualizing the discriminative image regions and localizing the chest diseases. The proposed work is compared with existing disease prediction models on chest X-rays and state-of-the-art deep learning strategies to assess the effectiveness of the proposed model. The proposed model is tested with a publicly available Open-I Dataset and data collected from a private hospital. After the comprehensive assessment, it is observed that the performance of the designed approach showcased a 7% to 18% increase in accuracy compared to the existing method.