Joint Diagnosis of Pneumonia, COVID-19, and Tuberculosis from Chest X-ray Images: A Deep Learning Approach.

Pneumonia, COVID-19, and tuberculosis are some of the most fatal and common lung diseases in the current era. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature for the diagnosis of individual diseases, since each requires a different feature set altogether, but few studies have been proposed for a joint diagnosis. A patient being diagnosed with one disease as negative may be suffering from the other disease, and vice versa. However, since said diseases are related to the lungs, there might be a likelihood of more than one disease being present in the same patient. In this study, a deep learning model that is able to detect the mentioned diseases from the chest X-ray images of patients is proposed. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, multiple public datasets have been obtained from Kaggle. Consequently, the proposed model achieved 98.72% accuracy for all classes in general and obtained a recall score of 99.66% for Pneumonia, 99.35% for No-findings, 98.10% for Tuberculosis, and 96.27% for COVID-19, respectively. Furthermore, the model was tested using unseen data from the same augmented dataset and was proven to be better than state-of-the-art studies in the literature in terms of accuracy and other metrics.