A Tuberculosis Detection Method Using Attention and Sparse R-CNN

To achieve accurate detection of tuberculosis (TB) areas in chest radiographs, we design a chest X-ray TB area detection algorithm. The algorithm consists of two stages: the chest X-ray TB classification network (CXTCNet) and the chest X-ray TB area detection network (CXTDNet). CXTCNet is used to judge the presence or absence of TB areas in chest X-ray images, thereby excluding the influence of other lung diseases on the detection of TB areas. It can reduce false positives in the detection network and improve the accuracy of detection results. In CXTCNet, we propose a channel attention mechanism (CAM) module and combine it with DenseNet. This module enables the network to learn more spatial and channel features information about chest X-ray images, thereby improving network performance. CXTDNet is a design based on a sparse object detection algorithm (Sparse R-CNN). A group of fixed learnable proposal boxes and learnable proposal features are using for classification and location. The predictions of the algorithm are output directly without non-maximal suppression post-processing. Furthermore, we use CLAHE to reduce image noise and improve image quality for data preprocessing. Experiments on dataset TBX11K show that the accuracy of the proposed CXTCNet is up to 99.10%, which is better than most current TB classification algorithms. Finally, our proposed chest X-ray TB detection algorithm could achieve AP of 45.35% and AP50 of 74.20%. We also establish a chest X-ray TB dataset with 304 sheets. And experiments on this dataset showed that the accuracy of the diagnosis was comparable to that of radiologists. We hope that our proposed algorithm and established dataset will advance the field of TB detection. Keywords: Tuberculosis, Chest X-ray, Computer-aided diagnosis, Object detection, Attention.