Pneumonia is a disease that develops rapidly and seriously threatens the survival and health of human beings. At present, the computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of pneumonia is mostly based on binary classification algorithms that cannot provide doctors with location information. To solve this problem, this study proposes an end-to-end highly efficient algorithm for the detection of pneumonia based on a convolutional neural network—Pneumonia Yolo (PYolo). This algorithm is an improved version of the Yolov3 algorithm for X-ray image data of the lungs. Dilated convolution and an attention mechanism are used to improve the detection results of pneumonia lesions. In addition, double K-means is used to generate an anchor box to improve the localization accuracy. The algorithm obtained 46.84 mean average precision (mAP) on the X-ray image dataset provided by the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), surpassing other detection algorithms. Thus, this study proposes an improved algorithm that can provide doctors with location information on lesions for the detection of pneumonia.

Pneumonia remains a threat to human health; the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that began at the end of 2019 had a major impact on the world. It is still raging in many countries and has caused great losses to people’s lives and property. In this paper, we present a method based on DeepConv-DilatedNet of identifying and localizing pneumonia in chest X-ray (CXR) images. Two-stage detector Faster R-CNN is adopted as the structure of a network. Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) is integrated into the residual neural network of a dilated bottleneck so that the deep features are expanded to preserve the deep feature and position information of the object. In the case of DeepConv-DilatedNet, the deconvolution network is used to restore high-level feature maps into its original size, and the target information is further retained. On the other hand, DeepConv-DilatedNet uses a popular fully convolution architecture with computation shared on the entire image. Then, Soft-NMS is used to screen boxes and ensure sample quality. Also, K-Means++ is used to generate anchor boxes to improve the localization accuracy. The algorithm obtained 39.23% Mean Average Precision (mAP) on the X-ray image dataset from the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) and got 38.02% Mean Average Precision (mAP) on the ChestX-ray14 dataset, surpassing other detection algorithms. So, in this paper, an improved algorithm that can provide doctors with location information of pneumonia lesions is proposed.

Pneumonia is a relatively common disease that will endanger the lives of patients if left untreated. End-to-end detection of pneumonia using neural networks will be helpful for reducing related workforce. CNN's processing of images shows remarkable performance, naturally, the use of CNN based methods for assisted reading will be a trend in modern medicine. The property of current detection algorithms is not yet satisfactory, so further research is extremely needed. In this article, we design GeminiNet to identify and localize the pneumonia in Chest X-ray (CXR) images. It uses a popular fully convolution architecture with computation shared on the entire image, combining RoI Align and PSRoI Pooling to capture global and local information and output. Our approach introduces DetNet59, a network designed specifically for detection to capture deep features. In the sixth stage of DetNet59, the structure of the retina-like convolutional layers is added to replace the fully connected layer. This structure uses the dilated convolution to extend the reconstructive field, and the convolution kernels of three different scales are used for parallel calculation to collect rich feature information. GeminiNet is validated on the RSNA dataset. We augment dataset by flipping on horizontal and vertical for the small amount of data. At IoU (Intersection over Union) = 0.5, AP reached 0.4575, 0.078 higher than ResNet50, and reached 0.7758 on the AUC indicator. GeminiNet achieves 8fps in detection speed, which is better than the 7fps of the popular Faster R-CNN architecture. INDEX TERMS Fully convolution network, DetNet59, receptive field block, GeminiNet, pneumonia detection.