This paper considers the task of thorax disease classification on chest X-ray images. Existing methods generally use the global image as input for network learning. Such a strategy is limited in two aspects. 1) A thorax disease usually happens in (small) localized areas which are disease specific. Training CNNs using global image may be affected by the (excessive) irrelevant noisy areas. 2) Due to the poor alignment of some CXR images, the existence of irregular borders hinders the network performance. In this paper, we address the above problems by proposing a three-branch attention guided convolution neural network (AG-CNN). AG-CNN 1) learns from disease-specific regions to avoid noise and improve alignment, 2) also integrates a global branch to compensate the lost discriminative cues by local branch. Specifically, we first learn a global CNN branch using global images. Then, guided by the attention heat map generated from the global branch, we inference a mask to crop a discriminative region from the global image. The local region is used for training a local CNN branch. Lastly, we concatenate the last pooling layers of both the global and local branches for fine-tuning the fusion branch. The Comprehensive experiment is conducted on the ChestX-ray14 dataset. We first report a strong global baseline producing an average AUC of 0.841 with ResNet-50 as backbone. After combining the local cues with the global information, AG-CNN improves the average AUC to 0.868. While DenseNet-121 is used, the average AUC achieves 0.871, which is a new state of the art in the community.
The CXR classification problem needs to tell the relatively subtle differences between different diseases. Usually, a disease is often characterized by a lesion region, which contains critical dues for classification. Ypsilantis al @cite_30 explore where to look in chest X-rays with recurrent attention model (RAM) @cite_17 . The RAM learns to sample the entire X-ray image sequentially and focus on informative areas. Only one disease is considered in their work. Recently, Pesce al @cite_5 explore a soft attention mechanism from the saliency map of CNN features to locate lung nodule position in radiographies. And a localization loss is calculated by comparing the predicted position with the annotated position.
@cite_30 @cite_5 @cite_17
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X-rays are commonly performed imaging tests that use small amounts of radiation to produce pictures of the organs, tissues, and bones of the body. X-rays of the chest are used to detect abnormalities or diseases of the airways, blood vessels, bones, heart, and lungs. In this work we present a stochastic attention-based model that is capable of learning what regions within a chest X-ray scan should be visually explored in order to conclude that the scan contains a specific radiological abnormality. The proposed model is a recurrent neural network (RNN) that learns to sequentially sample the entire X-ray and focus only on informative areas that are likely to contain the relevant information. We report on experiments carried out with more than @math X-rays containing enlarged hearts or medical devices. The model has been trained using reinforcement learning methods to learn task-specific policies. Abstract Machine learning approaches hold great potential for the automated detection of lung nodules on chest radiographs, but training algorithms requires very large amounts of manually annotated radiographs, which are difficult to obtain. The increasing availability of PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System), is laying the technological foundations needed to make available large volumes of clinical data and images from hospital archives. Binary labels indicating whether a radiograph contains a pulmonary lesion can be extracted at scale, using natural language processing algorithms. In this study, we propose two novel neural networks for the detection of chest radiographs containing pulmonary lesions. Both architectures make use of a large number of weakly-labelled images combined with a smaller number of manually annotated x-rays. The annotated lesions are used during training to deliver a type of visual attention feedback informing the networks about their lesion localisation performance. The first architecture extracts saliency maps from high-level convolutional layers and compares the inferred position of a lesion against the true position when this information is available; a localisation error is then back-propagated along with the softmax classification error. The second approach consists of a recurrent attention model that learns to observe a short sequence of smaller image portions through reinforcement learning; the reward function penalises the exploration of areas, within an image, that are unlikely to contain nodules. Using a repository of over 430,000 historical chest radiographs, we present and discuss the proposed methods over related architectures that use either weakly-labelled or annotated images only.