A hybrid deep learning approach towards building an intelligent system for pneumonia detection in chest X-ray images

Pneumonia is a major cause for the death of children. In order to overcome the subjectivity and time consumption of the traditional detection of pneumonia from chest X-ray images; this work hypothesized that a hybrid deep learning system that consists of a convolutional neural network (CNN) model with another type of classifiers will improve the performance of the detection system. Three types of classifiers (support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), and random forest (RF) were used along with the traditional CNN classification system (Softmax) to automatically detect pneumonia from chest X-ray images. The performance of the hybrid systems was comparable to that of the traditional CNN model with Softmax in terms of accuracy, precision, and specificity; except for the RF hybrid system which had less performance than the others. On the other hand, KNN hybrid system had the best consumption time, followed by the SVM, Softmax, and lastly the RF system. However, this improvement in consumption time (up to 4 folds) was in the expense of the sensitivity. A new hybrid artificial intelligence methodology for pneumonia detection has been implemented using small-sized chest X-ray images. The novel system achieved a very efficient performance with a short classification consumption time.