Enhanced Diagnosis of Pneumothorax with an Improved Real-Time Augmentation for Imbalanced Chest X-rays Data Based on DCNN

Pneumothorax is a common pulmonary disease that can lead to dyspnea and can be life-threatening. X-ray examination is the main means to diagnose this disease. Computer-aided diagnosis of pneumothorax on chest X-ray, as a prerequisite for a timely cure, has been widely studied, but it is still not satisfactory to achieve highly accurate results. In this paper, an image classification algorithm based on the deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is proposed for high-resolution medical image analysis of pneumothorax X-rays, which features a Network In Network (NIN) for cleaning the data, random histogram equalization data augmentation processing, and a DCNN. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can effectively increase the correct diagnosis rate of pneumothorax, and the Area under Curve (AUC) of the test verified in the experiment is 0.9844 on ZJU-2 test data and 0.9906 on the ChestX-ray14, respectively. In addition, a large number of atmospheric pleura samples are visualized and analyzed based on the experimental results and in-depth learning characteristics of the algorithm. The analysis results verify the validity of feature extraction for the network. Combined with the results of these two aspects, the proposed X-ray image processing algorithm can effectively improve the classification accuracy of pneumothorax photographs.