Reconstruction-based approach for chest X-ray image segmentation and enhanced multi-label chest disease classification

U-Net is a commonly used model for medical image segmentation. However, when applied to chest X-ray images that show pathologies, it often fails to include these critical pathological areas in the generated masks. To address this limitation, in our study, we tackled the challenge of precise segmentation and mask generation by developing a novel approach, using CycleGAN, that encompasses the areas affected by pathologies within the region of interest, allowing the extraction of relevant radiomic features linked to pathologies. Furthermore, we adopted a feature selection approach to focus the analysis on the most significant features. The results of our proposed pipeline are promising, with an average accuracy of 92.05% and an average AUC of 89.48% for the multi-label classification of effusion and infiltration acquired from the ChestX-ray14 dataset, using the XGBoost model. Furthermore, applying our methodology to the classification of the 14 diseases in the ChestX-ray14 dataset resulted in an average AUC of 83.12%, outperforming previous studies. This research highlights the importance of effective pathological mask generation and features selection for accurate classification of chest diseases. The promising results of our approach underscore its potential for broader applications in the classification of chest diseases.