Comparison Between Early and Intermediate Fusion of Multimodal Techniques: Lung Disease Diagnosis

Early and accurate diagnosis of lung diseases is essential for effective treatment and patient management. Conventional diagnostic models trained on a single data type often miss important clinical information. This study explored a multimodal deep learning framework that integrates cough sounds, chest radiograph (X-rays), and computed tomography (CT) scans to enhance disease classification performance. Two fusion strategies, early and intermediate fusion, were implemented and evaluated against three single-modality baselines. The dataset was collected from different sources. Each dataset underwent preprocessing steps, including noise removal, grayscale conversion, image cropping, and class balancing, to ensure data quality. Convolutional neural network (CNN) and Extreme Inception (Xception) architectures were used for feature extraction and classification. The results show that multimodal learning achieves superior performance compared with single models. The intermediate fusion model achieved 98% accuracy, while the early fusion model reached 97%. In contrast, single CXR and CT models achieved 94%, and the cough sound model achieved 79%. These results confirm that multimodal integration, particularly intermediate fusion, offers a more reliable framework for automated lung disease diagnosis.