CorLabelNet: a comprehensive framework for multi-label chest X-ray image classification with correlation guided discriminant feature learning and oversampling

Recent advancements in deep learning techniques have significantly improved multi-label chest X-ray (CXR) image classification for clinical diagnosis. However, most previous studies neither effectively learn label correlations nor take full advantage of them to improve multi-label classification performance. In addition, different labels of CXR images are usually severely imbalanced, resulting in the model exhibiting a bias towards the majority class. To address these challenges, we introduce a framework that not only learns label correlations but also utilizes them to guide the learning of features and the process of oversampling. In this paper, our approach incorporates self-attention to capture high-order label correlations and considers label correlations from both global and local perspectives. Then, we propose a consistency constraint and a multi-label contrastive loss to enhance feature learning. To alleviate the imbalance issue, we further propose an oversampling approach that exploits the learned label correlation to identify crucial seed samples for oversampling. Our approach repeats 5-fold cross-validation process experiments three times and achieves the best performance on both the CheXpert and ChestX-Ray14 datasets. Learning accurate label correlation is significant for multi-label classification and taking full advantage of label correlations is beneficial for discriminative feature learning and oversampling. A comparative analysis with the state-of-the-art approaches highlights the effectiveness of our proposed methods.