Hybrid CLAHE-CNN Deep Neural Networks for Classifying Lung Diseases from X-ray Acquisitions

Chest and lung diseases are among the most serious chronic diseases in the world, and they occur as a result of factors such as smoking, air pollution, or bacterial infection, which would expose the respiratory system and chest to serious disorders. Chest diseases lead to a natural weakness in the respiratory system, which requires the patient to take care and attention to alleviate this problem. Countries are interested in encouraging medical research and monitoring the spread of communicable diseases. Therefore, they advised researchers to perform studies to curb the diseases’ spread and urged researchers to devise methods for swiftly and readily detecting and distinguishing lung diseases. In this paper, we propose a hybrid architecture of contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and deep convolutional network for the classification of lung diseases. We used X-ray images to create a convolutional neural network (CNN) for early identification and categorization of lung diseases. Initially, the proposed method implemented the support vector machine to classify the images with and without using CLAHE equalizer. The obtained results were compared with the CNN networks. Later, two different experiments were implemented with hybrid architecture of deep CNN networks and CLAHE as a preprocessing for image enhancement. The experimental results indicate that the suggested hybrid architecture outperforms traditional methods by roughly 20% in terms of accuracy.