The latest World Health Organization's (WHO) study on 2018 is showing that about 1.5 million people died and around 10 million people are infected with tuberculosis (TB) each year. Moreover, more than 4,000 people die every day from TB. A number of those deaths could have been stopped if the disease was identified sooner. In the recent literature, important work can be found on automating the diagnosis by applying techniques of deep learning (DL) to the medical images. While DL has yielded promising results in many areas, comprehensive TB diagnostic studies remain limited. DL requires a large number of high-quality training samples to yield better performance. Due to the low contrast of TB chest x-ray (CXR) images, they are often is in poor quality. This work assesses the effect of image enhancement on performance of DL technique to address this problem. The employed image enhancement algorithm was able to highlight the overall or local characteristics of the images, including some interesting features. Specifically, three image enhancement algorithms called Unsharp Masking (UM), High-Frequency Emphasis Filtering (HEF) and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE), were evaluated. The enhanced image samples were then fed to the pre-trained ResNet and EfficientNet models for transfer learning. In a TB image dataset, we achieved 89.92% and 94.8% of classification accuracy and AUC (Area Under Curve) scores, respectively. All the results are obtained using Shenzhen dataset, which are available in the public domain.

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