A Novel Convolutional-Transformer Neural Network Architecture for Diagnosis of Pneumothorax

Pneumothorax is a life-threatening and urgent chest disease than can be detected using Chest X-Ray (CXR) image. CXR images are low resolution and diagnosis of pneumothorax based on them is error prone. Deep learning-based computer aided diagnosis systems can improve diagnosis performance of pneumothorax. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are default networks in deep learning-based medical image process. However, CNNs fail to capture long range features. On the other side, Transformer are proposed to exploit long range feature, but they cannot capture local features. In this paper, we propose a general method with a convolution and a transformer module which can classify CXR images to diagnose pneumothorax by extracting local features, global features and global features attended by local ones using a novel architecture. Results show that the proposed method outperforms base architectures and the other previous works.