Intelligent Pneumonia Identification From Chest X-Rays: A Systematic Literature Review

Chest radiography is a significant diagnostic tool used to detect diseases afflicting the chest. The automatic detection techniques associated with computer vision are being adopted in medical imaging research. Over the last decade, several remarkable advancements have been made in the field of medical diagnostics with the application of deep learning techniques. Various automated systems have been proposed for the rapid detection of pneumonia from chest X-rays. Although several algorithms are currently available for pneumonia detection, a detailed review summarizing the literature and offering guidelines for medical practitioners is lacking. This study will help practitioners to select the most effective and efficient methods from a real-time perspective, review the available datasets, and understand the results obtained in this domain. It will also present an overview of the literature on intelligent pneumonia identification from chest X-rays. The usability, goodness factors, and computational complexities of the algorithms employed for intelligent pneumonia identification are analyzed. Additionally, this study discusses the quality, usability, and size of the available chest X-ray datasets and techniques for coping with unbalanced datasets. A detailed comparison of the available studies reveals that the majority of the applied datasets are highly unbalanced and limited, providing unreliable results and rendering methods that are unsuitable for large-scale use. Large-scale balanced datasets can be obtained via smart techniques, such as generative adversarial networks. Current literature has indicated that deep learning-based algorithms achieve the best results for pneumonia classification with an accuracy of 98.7%, a sensitivity of 0.99, and a specificity of 0.98. The higher accuracy offered by deep-learning algorithms in addition to their appropriate class balancing techniques serves as a good reference for further research.