Pneumonia detection in chest X-ray images using convolutional neural networks and transfer learning

A large number of children die due to pneumonia every year worldwide. An estimated 1.2 million episodes of pneumonia were reported in children up to 5 years of age, of which 880,000 died in 2016. Hence, pneumonia is a major cause of death amongst children, with high prevalence rate in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Even in a developed country like the United States, pneumonia is among the top 10 causes of deaths. Early detection and treatment of pneumonia can reduce mortality rates among children significantly in countries having a high prevalence. Hence, this paper presents Convolutional Neural Network models to detect pneumonia using x-ray images. Several Convolutional Neural Networks were trained to classify x-ray images into two classes viz., pneumonia and non-pneumonia, by changing various parameters, hyperparameters and number of convolutional layers. Six models have been mentioned in the paper. First and second models consist of two and three convolutional layers, respectively. The other four models are pre-trained models, which are VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50, and Inception-v3. The first and second models achieve a validation accuracy of 85.26% and 92.31% respectively. The accuracy of VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50 and Inception-v3 are 87.28%, 88.46%, 77.56% and 70.99% respectively. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.