Real Time Chest X-Ray Interpretation Applying Vision Transformer for Tuberculosis Detection

Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease that can attack the lungs and other organs. In the diagnosis of TB, the interpretation of X-ray radiological images requires special skills from medical specialists. However, the lack of experience of medical personnel and focus on X-ray examinations can be a challenge for radiologists because it has the potential to cause diagnostic errors in image interpretation. Therefore, we proposed a web-based application of real-time chest X-ray interpreter by integrating the deep learning model of Vision Transformer (ViT) to interpret chest X-ray images. The inference model was trained and tested on 652 normal and 652 tuberculosis X-ray images. The data preprocessing of Contrast Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) was implemented to increase chest X-ray image contrast as well as inference model performance. The proposed real time system can inteprete the tested chest x-ray images with an accuracy of 95% and with simulation duration time of 4.7 seconds.