1. Detecting drug-resistant tuberculosis in chest radiographs
- Author
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Jaeger, Stefan, Juarez-Espinosa, Octavio, Candemir, Sema, Poostchi, Mahdieh, Yang, Feng, Kim, Lewis, Ding, Meng, Folio, Les, Antani, Sameer, Gabrielian, Andrei, Hurt, Darrell, Rosenthal, Alex, and Thoma, George
- Abstract
Tuberculosis is a major global health threat claiming millions of lives each year. While the total number of tuberculosis cases has been decreasing over the last years, the rise of drug-resistant tuberculosis has reduced the chance of controlling the disease. The purpose is to implement a timely diagnosis of drug-resistant tuberculosis, which is essential to administering adequate treatment regimens and stopping the further transmission of drug-resistant tuberculosis. A main tool for diagnosing tuberculosis is the conventional chest X-ray. We are investigating the possibility of discriminating automatically between drug-resistant and drug-sensitive tuberculosis in chest X-rays by means of image analysis and machine learning methods. For discriminating between drug-sensitive and drug-resistant tuberculosis, we achieve an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of up to 66%, using an artificial neural network in combination with a set of shape and texture features. We did not observe any significant difference in the results when including follow-up X-rays for each patient. Our results suggest that a chest X-ray contains information about the likelihood of a drug-resistant tuberculosis infection, which can be exploited computationally. We therefore suggest to repeat the experiments of our pilot study on a larger set of chest X-rays.
- Published
- 2018
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