An advanced approach for accurate pneumonia detection using combined deep convolutional neural networks

Pneumonia, a lung infection caused by viral or bacterial agents, poses a significant health risk by affecting one or both lungs in humans. Accurate diagnosis, particularly in pediatric cases, is crucial for timely intervention. chest X-rays (CXRs) are a common and non-invasive diagnostic tool to detect pneumonia-related abnormalities. Nonetheless, the minimal radiation exposure suitable for pediatric diagnosis poses a challenge in accurately detecting pneumonia in children. This work proposes a concatenation model that combines two pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) depending on the transfer learning (TL) technique and optimizes the training parameters to build a highly accurate model for detecting pediatric pneumonia from CXR images. The concatenated extracted features from the two pre-trained CNNs are passed through a convolutional layer to select more valuable semantic features to reduce the extracted features, which helps reduce the model parameters and execution time. Experimental results demonstrate that the feature concatenation technique, along with optimization of training parameters, surpasses the performance of individual CNNs and several state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method achieves a classification accuracy of 98.5%, precision of 99.5%, sensitivity of 98.4%, and F1 score of 99.1%. The primary objective of the proposed approach is to aid radiologists in achieving accurate pneumonia diagnosis in real-time.