Lung Disease Classification Using Transfer Learning on Chest X-ray Images

Abstract

Lung diseases remain a significant global health concern, necessitating the development of rapid and accurate diagnostic methods. While previous research has shown the promise of deep learning models, particularly transfer learning with architectures such as ResNet and VGG, limitations persist in evaluation scope, class imbalance handling, and model interpretability. This study proposes an enhanced deep learning framework for multi-label classification of thoracic diseases using chest X-ray images, addressing these gaps through comprehensive evaluation metrics, advanced data augmentation, and explainable AI (XAI) techniques. The NIH ChestX-ray14 dataset is utilized, with class imbalance mitigated via synthetic minority oversampling and weighted focal loss. Multiple state-of-the-art CNN architectures, including EfficientNet and ResNet variants, are benchmarked using precision, recall, F1 Score, AUC, and accuracy. Moreover, Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) is integrated to visualize pathological regions, improving clinical interpretability. The offered framework can perform better in all assessment criteria, achieving an AUC of 0.91 with EfficientNet-B0, and provides interpretable outputs critical for deployment in real-world diagnostic settings. This work advances automated radiological diagnosis by addressing key methodological shortcomings and offers a reliable, explainable solution for lung disease detection.