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An X-ray image classification method with fine-grained features for explainable diagnosis of pneumoconiosis

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Abstract

Medical image classification has become popular in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of pneumoconiosis. However, most current work focuses on improving the accuracy of classification results and has overlooked the corresponding medical explanations. With the expectation to achieve these two sub-goals simultaneously, we propose an explainable X-ray image classification method with fine-grained features to diagnose pneumoconiosis. The proposed method consists of three consecutive stages. First, we generate a highlighted discriminative region by gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) for each sample. Thus, we can give a visual explanation for the basis of classification. Then, we utilize selective convolutional descriptor aggregation (SCDA) to extract fine-grained features from the obtained discriminative region. After dimension reduction of obtained fine-grained features, we finally make a classification with these features to discover which samples are diseased. Extensive experiments on actual pneumoconiosis X-ray image datasets have shown the validity and superiority of our method.

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Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to personal privacy protection, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Author notes

  1. Jia He and Lin Shang are authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing Vocational College of Information Technology, 99 Wenlan Road, Qixia District, Nanjing, 210023, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China

    Chunmei Zhang

  2. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University, 163 Xianlin Road, Qixia District, Nanjing, 210023, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China

    Jia He & Lin Shang

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  1. Chunmei Zhang
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  2. Jia He
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Correspondence to Chunmei Zhang.

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Zhang, C., He, J. & Shang, L. An X-ray image classification method with fine-grained features for explainable diagnosis of pneumoconiosis. Pers Ubiquit Comput 28, 403–415 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-023-01730-3

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