Classification of Lung Diseases Using an Attention-Based Modified DenseNet Model

Lung diseases represent a significant global health threat, impacting both well-being and mortality rates. Diagnostic procedures such as Computed Tomography (CT) scans and X-ray imaging play a pivotal role in identifying these conditions. X-rays, due to their easy accessibility and affordability, serve as a convenient and cost-effective option for diagnosing lung diseases. Our proposed method utilized the Contrast-Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) enhancement technique on X-ray images to highlight the key feature maps related to lung diseases using DenseNet201. We have augmented the existing Densenet201 model with a hybrid pooling and channel attention mechanism. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our model over well-known pre-trained models, such as VGG16, VGG19, InceptionV3, Xception, ResNet50, ResNet152, ResNet50V2, ResNet152V2, MobileNetV2, DenseNet121, DenseNet169, and DenseNet201. Our model achieves impressive accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-scores of 95.34%, 97%, 96%, and 96%, respectively. We also provide visual insights into our model's decision-making process using Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) to identify normal, pneumothorax, and atelectasis cases. The experimental results of our model in terms of heatmap may help radiologists improve their diagnostic abilities and labelling processes.