Pneumonia detection on x-ray image using improved depthwise separable convolutional neural networks

A single neural network model cannot capture intricate and diverse features due to its ability to learn only a finite set of patterns from the data. Additionally, training and utilising a single model can be computationally demanding. Experts propose incorporating multiple neural network models to address these constraints to extract complementary attributes. Previous research has highlighted challenges network models face, including difficulties in effectively capturing highly detailed spatial features, redundancy in network structure parameters, and restricted generalisation capabilities. This study introduces an innovative neural network architecture that combines the Xception module with the inverse residue structure to tackle these issues. Considering this, the paper presents a model for detecting pneumonia in X-ray images employing an improved depthwise separable convolutional network. This network architecture integrates the inverse residual structure from the MobileNetV2 model, using the rectified linear unit (ReLU) non-linear activation function throughout the entire network. The experimental results show an impressive recognition rate with a test accuracy of 97.24% on the chest x-ray dataset. This method can extract more profound and abstract image features while mitigating overfitting issues and enhancing the network's generalisation capacity.