PNet: An Efficient Network for Pneumonia Detection

Abstract

Pneumonia is a common lung disease and affects millions of people worldwide each year. The chest X-ray is one of the most commonly accessible radiological examinations for screening and diagnosing lung diseases. Usually, chest X-ray images (CXRs) are taken at physical examination and evaluated by radiologists. The unbalance between tremendous numbers of CXRs and limited number of radiologists need to be solved by Computer Assisted Diagnosis (CAD). As deep neural networks have shown promising results in CAD, we implemented a deep learning-based framework, PNet, for pneumonia detection. 10784 chest X-ray images collected at the Shenzhen No.2 People's Hospital were employed for training and evaluation. The experimental results showed that the proposed PNet (1,695,777 parameters) achieved higher accuracy and F1 score than classical networks like AlexNet (42,725,889 parameters) and VGG16 (27,560,769 parameters).