• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.25-31
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• 2017

Testing TB in chest X-ray images is a typical method to diagnose presence and magnitude of PTB lesion. However, the method has limitation due to inter-reader variability. Therefore, it is essential to overcome this drawback with automatic interpretation. In this study, we propose a novel method for detection of PTB using SegNet, which is a deep learning architecture for semantic pixel wise image labelling. SegNet is composed of a stack of encoders followed by a corresponding decoder stack which feeds into a soft-max classification layer. We modified parameters of SegNet to change the number of classes from 12 to 2 (TB or none-TB) and applied the architecture to automatically interpret chest radiographs. 552 chest X-ray images, provided by The Korean Institute of Tuberculosis, used for training and test and we constructed a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. As a consequence, the area under the curve (AUC) was 90.4% (95% CI:[85.1, 95.7]) with a classification accuracy of 84.3%. A sensitivity was 85.7% and specificity was 82.8% on 431 training images (TB 172, none-TB 259) and 121 test images (TB 63, none-TB 58). This results show that detecting PTB using SegNet is comparable to other PTB detection methods.