Enhancing Pneumonia Detection in Pediatric Chest X-Rays Using CGAN-Augmented Datasets and Lightweight Deep Transfer Learning Models

Pneumonia ranks as a leading cause of mortality, particularly in children aged five and under. Detecting this disease typically requires radiologists to examine chest X-rays and report their findings to physicians, a task susceptible to human error. The application of Deep Transfer Learning (DTL) for the identification of pneumonia through chest X-rays is hindered by a shortage of available images, which has led to less than optimal DTL performance and issues with overfitting. Overfitting is characterized by a model’s learning that is too closely fitted to the training data, reducing its effectiveness on unseen data. The problem of overfitting is especially prevalent in medical image processing due to the high costs and extensive time required for image annotation, as well as the challenge of collecting substantial datasets that also respect patient privacy concerning infectious diseases such as pneumonia. To mitigate these challenges, this paper introduces the use of conditional generative adversarial networks (CGAN) to enrich the pneumonia dataset with 2690 synthesized X-ray images of the minority class, aiming to even out the dataset distribution for improved diagnostic performance. Subsequently, we applied four modified lightweight deep transfer learning models such as Xception, MobileNetV2, MobileNet, and EfficientNetB0. These models have been fine-tuned and evaluated, demonstrating remarkable detection accuracies of 99.26%, 98.23%, 97.06%, and 94.55%, respectively, across fifty epochs. The experimental results validate that the models we have proposed achieve high detection accuracy rates, with the best model reaching up to 99.26% effectiveness, outperforming other models in the diagnosis of pneumonia from X-ray images.