Novel Pooling-Based VGG-Lite for Pneumonia and Covid-19 Detection From Imbalanced Chest X-Ray Datasets

This paper proposes a novel pooling-based VGG-Lite model in order to mitigate class imbalance issues in Chest X-Ray (CXR) datasets. Automatic Pneumonia detection from CXR images by deep learning model has emerged as a prominent and dynamic area of research, since the inception of the new Covid-19 variant in 2020. However, the standard Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models encounter challenges associated with class imbalance, a prevalent issue found in many medical datasets. The innovations introduced in the proposed model architecture include: (I) A very lightweight CNN model, “VGG-Lite”, is proposed as a base model, inspired by VGG-16 and MobileNet-V2 architecture. (II) On top of this base model, we leverage an “Edge Enhanced Module (EEM)” through a parallel branch, consisting of a “negative image layer”, and a novel custom pooling layer “2Max-Min Pooling”. This 2Max-Min Pooling layer is entirely novel in this investigation, providing more attention to edge components within pneumonia CXR images. Thus, it works as an efficient spatial attention module (SAM). We have implemented the proposed framework on two separate CXR datasets. The first dataset is obtained from a readily available source on the internet, and the second dataset is a more challenging CXR dataset, assembled by our research team from three different sources. Experimental results reveal that our proposed framework has outperformed pre-trained CNN models, and three recent trend existing models “Vision Transformer”, “Pooling-based Vision Transformer (PiT)” and “PneuNet”, by substantial margins on both datasets. The proposed framework VGG-Lite with EEM, has achieved a macro average of 95% accuracy, 97.1% precision, 96.1% recall, and 96.6% F1 score on the “Pneumonia Imbalance CXR dataset”, without employing any pre-processing technique.