Multi-Label Disease Detection in Chest X-Ray Imaging Using a Fine-Tuned ConvNeXtV2 with a Customized Classifier

Deep-learning-based multiple label chest X-ray classification has achieved significant success, but existing models still have three main issues: fixed-scale convolutions fail to capture both large and small lesions, standard pooling is lacking in the lack of attention to important regions, and linear classification lacks the capacity to model complex dependency between features. To circumvent these obstacles, we propose CONVFCMAE, a lightweight yet powerful framework that is built on a backbone that is partially frozen (77.08 % of the initial layers are fixed) in order to preserve complex, multi-scale features while decreasing the number of trainable parameters. Our architecture adds (1) an intelligent global pooling module that is learnable, with 1×1 convolutions that are dynamically weighted by their spatial location, and (2) a multi-head attention block that is dedicated to channel re-calibration, along with (3) a two-layer MLP that has been enhanced with ReLU, batch normalization, and dropout. This module is used to enhance the non-linearity of the feature space. To further reduce the noise associated with labels and the imbalance in class distribution inherent to the NIH ChestXray14 dataset, we utilize a combined loss that combines BCEWithLogits and Focal Loss as well as extensive data augmentation. On ChestXray14, the average ROC–AUC of CONVFCMAE is 0.852, which is 3.97 percent greater than the state of the art. Ablation experiments demonstrate the individual and collective effectiveness of each component. Grad-CAM visualizations have a superior capacity to localize the pathological regions, and this increases the interpretability of the model. Overall, CONVFCMAE provides a practical, generalizable solution to the problem of extracting features from medical images in a practical manner.