Deep Learning for Lung Disease Classification Using Transfer Learning and a Customized CNN Architecture with Attention

Many people die from lung-related diseases every year. X-ray is an effective way to test if one is diagnosed with a lung-related disease or not. This study concentrates on categorizing three distinct types of lung X-rays: those depicting healthy lungs, those showing lung opacities, and those indicative of viral pneumonia. Accurately diagnosing the disease at an early phase is critical. In this paper, five different pre-trained models will be tested on the Lung X-ray Image Dataset. SqueezeNet, VGG11, ResNet18, DenseNet, and MobileNetV2 achieved accuracies of 0.64, 0.85, 0.87, 0.88, and 0.885, respectively. MobileNetV2, as the best-performing pre-trained model, will then be further analyzed as the base model. Eventually, our own model, MobileNet-Lung based on MobileNetV2, with fine-tuning and an additional layer of attention within feature layers, was invented to tackle the lung disease classification task and achieved an accuracy of 0.933. This result is significantly improved compared with all five pre-trained models.