Automated Pneumoconiosis Detection on Chest X-Rays Using Cascaded Learning with Real and Synthetic Radiographs

Pneumoconiosis is an incurable respiratory disease caused by long-term inhalation of respirable dust. Due to small pneumoconiosis incidence and restrictions on sharing of patient data, the number of available pneumoconiosis X-rays is insufficient, which introduces significant challenges for training deep learning models. In this paper, we use both real and synthetic pneumoconiosis radiographs to train a cascaded machine learning framework for the automated detection of pneumoconiosis, including a machine learning based pixel classifier for lung field segmentation, and Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks (CycleGAN) for generating abundant lung field images for training, and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based image classier. Experiments are conducted to compare the classification results from several state-of-the-art machine learning models and ours. Our proposed model outperforms the others and achieves an overall classification accuracy of 90.24%, a specificity of 88.46% and an excellent sensitivity of 93.33% for detecting pneumoconiosis.