A LUNG IMAGE CLASSIFICATION METHOD: A CLASSIFIER CONSTRUCTED BY COMBINING IMPROVED VGG16 AND GRADIENT BOOSTING DECISION TREE

Early classification and diagnosis of lung diseases is essential to increase the best chance of patient recovery and survival. Using deep learning to make it possible, the key is how to improve the robustness of the deep learning model and the accuracy of lung image classification. In order to classify the five lung diseases, we used transfer learning to improve and fine-tune the fully connected layer of VGG16, and improve the cross entropy loss function, combined with the gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT), to establish a deep learning model called a classifier. The model was trained using the ChestX-ray14 dataset. On the test set, the classification accuracy of our model for the five lung diseases was 82.43%, 95.37%, 82.11%, 79.81%, 78.13%, which is better than the best published results. The F1 value is 0.456 (95% CI 0.415, 0.496). The robustness of the model exceeds CheXNet and average performance of doctors. This study clarified that the model has strong robustness and effectiveness in classifying five lung diseases.