Deep Learning Approach for Pneumonia Prediction from X-Rays using A Pretrained Densenet Model

Pneumonia remains a major global health concern, particularly affecting young children and older adults, contributing to significant morbidity and mortality. Traditional diagnostic methods using chest CT scans are time-consuming and prone to errors due to the reliance on manual interpretation. This study investigates the application of DenseNet architectures DenseNet121, DenseNet169, and DenseNet201—for automated pneumonia detection from chest X-ray images. The dataset, obtained from the Guangzhou Women and Children’s Medical Center, consists of 5,216 training images and 624 testing images categorized into normal and pneumonia cases. Data augmentation techniques, including rotation, normalization, and shear, were applied to improve training efficiency. The DenseNet models were pre-trained on ImageNet and fine-tuned by adding fully connected layers with 256 neurons and sigmoid activation. The models were trained for 20 epochs using the Adam optimizer and binary cross-entropy loss function. Performance evaluation revealed that DenseNet201 outperformed the other models, achieving a precision of 0.99 and a recall of 0.61 for normal cases (F1-score of 0.75) and a precision of 0.81 with a recall of 0.99 for pneumonia cases (F1-score of 0.89). These findings demonstrate that DenseNet201 provides a reliable and effective solution for automated pneumonia detection, offering improved diagnostic efficiency and accuracy compared to traditional methods.