A Hybrid Deep Learning Approach for Enhanced Classification of Lung Pathologies From Chest X‐Ray

ABSTRACT The increasing global burden of lung diseases necessitates the development of improved diagnostic tools. According to the WHO, hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide are currently affected by various forms of lung disease. The rapid advancement of artificial neural networks has revolutionized lung disease diagnosis, enabling the development of highly effective detection and classification systems. This article presents dual channel neural networks in image feature extraction based on classical CNN and vision transformers for multi‐label lung disease diagnosis. Two separate subnetworks are employed to capture both global and local feature representations, thereby facilitating the extraction of more informative and discriminative image features. The global network analyzes all‐organ regions, while the local network simultaneously focuses on multiple single‐organ regions. We then apply a novel feature fusion operation, leveraging a multi‐head attention mechanism to weight global features according to the significance of localized features. Through this multi‐channel approach, the framework is designed to identify complicated and subtle features within images, which often go unnoticed by the human eye. Evaluation on the ChestX‐ray14 benchmark dataset demonstrates that our hybrid model consistently outperforms established state‐of‐the‐art architectures, including ResNet‐50, DenseNet‐121, and CheXNet, by achieving significantly higher AUC scores across multiple thoracic disease classification tasks. By incorporating test‐time augmentation, the model achieved an average accuracy of 95.7% and a specificity of 99%. The experimental findings indicated that our model attained an average testing AUC of 87%. In addition, our method tackles a more practical clinical problem, and preliminary results suggest its feasibility and effectiveness. It could assist clinicians in making timely decisions about lung diseases.