Ensemble of EfficientNets for the Diagnosis of Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a life-threatening disease and is one of the leading causes of mortality in developing regions due to poverty and inadequate medical resources. Tuberculosis is medicable, but it necessitates early diagnosis through reliable screening techniques. Chest X-ray is a recommended screening procedure for identifying pulmonary abnormalities. Still, this recommendation is not enough without experienced radiologists to interpret the screening results, which forms part of the problems in rural communities. Consequently, various computer-aided diagnostic systems have been developed for the automatic detection of tuberculosis. However, their sensitivity and accuracy are still significant challenges that require constant improvement due to the severity of the disease. Hence, this study explores the application of a leading state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (EfficientNets) model for the classification of tuberculosis. Precisely, five variants of EfficientNets were fine-tuned and implemented on two prominent and publicly available chest X-ray datasets (Montgomery and Shenzhen). The experiments performed show that EfficientNet-B4 achieved the best accuracy of 92.33% and 94.35% on both datasets. These results were then improved through Ensemble learning and reached 97.44%. The performance recorded in this study portrays the efficiency of fine-tuning EfficientNets on medical imaging classification through Ensemble.