Contribution to pulmonary diseases diagnostic from X-ray images using innovative deep learning models

Pulmonary disease identification and characterization are among the most intriguing research topics of recent years since they require an accurate and prompt diagnosis. Although pulmonary radiography has helped in lung disease diagnosis, the interpretation of the radiographic image has always been a major concern for doctors and radiologists to reduce diagnosis errors. Due to their success in image classification and segmentation tasks, cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques like machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) are widely encouraged to be applied in the field of diagnosing lung disorders and identifying them using medical images, particularly radiographic ones. For this end, the researchers are concurring to build systems based on these techniques in particular deep learning ones. In this paper, we proposed three deep-learning models that were trained to identify the presence of certain lung diseases using thoracic radiography. The first model, named “CovCXR-Net”, identifies the COVID-19 disease (two cases: COVID-19 or normal). The second model, named “MDCXR3-Net”, identifies the COVID-19 and pneumonia diseases (three cases: COVID-19, pneumonia, or normal), and the last model, named “MDCXR4-Net”, is destined to identify the COVID-19, pneumonia and the pulmonary opacity diseases (4 cases: COVID-19, pneumonia, pulmonary opacity or normal). These models have proven their superiority in comparison with the state-of-the-art models and reached an accuracy of 99,09 %, 97.74 %, and 90,37 % respectively with three benchmarks.