A lightweight deep learning architecture for the automatic detection of pneumonia using chest X-ray images

Pneumonia is a life-threatening respiratory lung disease. Children are more prone to be affected by the disease and accurate manual detection is not easy. Generally, chest radiographs are used for the manual detection of pneumonia and expert radiologists are required for the assessment of the X-ray images. An automatic system would be beneficial for the diagnosis of pneumonia based on chest radiographs as manual detection is time-consuming and tedious. Therefore, a method is proposed in this paper for the fast and automatic detection of pneumonia. A deep learning-based architecture ‘MobileNet’ is proposed for the automatic detection of pneumonia based on the chest X-ray images. A benchmark dataset of 5856 chest X-ray images was taken for the training, testing, and evaluation of the proposed deep learning network. The proposed model was trained within 3 Hrs. and achieved a training accuracy of 97.34%, a validation accuracy of 87.5%, and a testing accuracy of 94.23% for automatic detection of pneumonia. However, the combined accuracy was achieved as 97.09% with 0.96 specificity, 0.97 precision, 0.98 recall, and 0.97 F-Score. The proposed method was found faster and computationally lesser expensive as compared to other methods in the literature and achieved a promising accuracy.