Diagnosis of Pediatric Pneumonia with Ensemble of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks in Chest X-Ray Images

Pneumonia is a fatal disease that appears in the lungs and is caused by viral or bacterial infection. Diagnosis of pneumonia in chest X-ray images can be difficult and error-prone because of its similarity with other infections in the lungs. The aim of this study is to develop a computer-aided pneumonia detection system to facilitate the diagnosis decision process. Therefore, a convolutional neural network (CNN) ensemble method was proposed for the automatic diagnosis of pneumonia which is seen in children. In this context, seven well-known CNN models (VGG-16, VGG-19, ResNet-50, Inception-V3, Xception, MobileNet, and SqueezeNet) pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset were trained with the appropriate transfer learning and fine-tuning strategies on the chest X-ray dataset. Among the seven different models, the three most successful ones were selected for the ensemble method. The final results were obtained by combining the predictions of CNN models with the ensemble method during the test. In addition, a CNN model was trained from scratch, and the results of this model were compared with the proposed ensemble method. The proposed ensemble method achieved remarkable results with an AUC of 95.21 and a sensitivity of 97.76 on the test data. Also, the proposed ensemble method achieved classification accuracy of 90.71 in chest X-ray images as normal, viral pneumonia, and bacterial pneumonia.