Automated Pulmonary Tuberculosis Severity Assessment on Chest X-rays

AbstractAccording to the 2022 World Health Organization's Global Tuberculosis (TB) report, an estimated 10.6 million people fell ill  with TB, and 1.6 million died from the disease in 2021. In addition, 2021 saw a reversal of a decades-long trend of declining TB infections and deaths, with an estimated increase of 4.5% in the number of people who fell ill with TB compared to 2020, and an estimated yearly increase of 450,000 ca ses of drug resistant TB. Estimating the severity of pulmonary TB using frontal chest X-rays (CXR) can enable better resource allocation in resource constrained settings and monitoring of treatment response, enabling prompt treatment modifications if disease severity does not decrease over time. The Timika score is a clinically used TB severity score based on a CXR reading. This work proposes and evaluates three deep learning-based approaches for predicting the Timika score with varying levels of explainability. The first approach uses two deep learning-based models, one to explicitly det ect lesion regions using YOLOV5n and another to predict the presence of cavitation using DenseNet121, which are then utilized in score calculation. The second approach uses a DenseNet121-based regression model to directly predict the affected lung percentage and another to predict cavitation pres ence using a DenseNet121-based classification model. Finally, the third approach directly predicts the Timika score using a DenseNet121-based regression model. The...
Source: Journal of Digital Imaging - Category: Radiology Source Type: research