Secure pulmonary diagnosis using transformer-based approach to X-ray classification with KL divergence optimization

Lung disease classification plays a significant part in the early discovery and determination of respiratory conditions.

This paper proposes a novel approach for lung disease classification utilizing two advanced deep learning models, MedViT and Swin Transformer, applied to the Lung X-Ray Image Dataset that includes 10,425 X-ray images categorized into three classes: Normal with 3,750 images, Lung Opacity with 3,375 images, and Viral Pneumonia with 3,300 images. A series of data augmentation methods, including geometric and photometric augmentation, are applied to improve model performance and generalization.

The results illustrate that both MedViT and Swin Transformer accomplish promising classification accuracy, with MedViT showing particular strength in medical image-specific feature learning due to its hybrid convolutional and transformer design. The impact of different loss functions is also examined, where Kullback-Leibler Divergence yields the highest accuracy and effectively handles class imbalance. The best-performing MedViT model achieves an accuracy of 98.6% with a loss of 0.09.

These findings highlight the potential of transformer-based models, particularly MedViT, for reliable clinical decision support in automated lung disease classification.