Chest X-Rays Image Classification from beta-Variational Autoencoders Latent Features
This work addresses automated diagnostic classification in medical imaging, but it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackled chest X-ray image classification by extracting latent features from beta-Variational Autoencoders trained on the CheXpert dataset and using them to train machine learning models, achieving encouraging results that demonstrate the viability of the approach.
Chest X-Ray (CXR) is one of the most common diagnostic techniques used in everyday clinical practice all around the world. We hereby present a work which intends to investigate and analyse the use of Deep Learning (DL) techniques to extract information from such images and allow to classify them, trying to keep our methodology as general as possible and possibly also usable in a real world scenario without much effort, in the future. To move in this direction, we trained several beta-Variational Autoencoder (beta-VAE) models on the CheXpert dataset, one of the largest publicly available collection of labeled CXR images; from these models, latent features have been extracted and used to train other Machine Learning models, able to classify the original images from the features extracted by the beta-VAE. Lastly, tree-based models have been combined together in ensemblings to improve the results without the necessity of further training or models engineering. Expecting some drop in pure performance with the respect to state of the art classification specific models, we obtained encouraging results, which show the viability of our approach and the usability of the high level features extracted by the autoencoders for classification tasks.