A Deep Learning Approach Considering Image Background for Pneumonia Identification Using Explainable AI (XAI)

Pneumonia mainly refers to lung infections caused by pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses. Currently, deep learning methods have been applied to identify pneumonia. However, the traditional deep learning methods for pneumonia identification take less account of the influence of the lung X-ray image background on the model’s testing effect, which limits the improvement of the model’s accuracy. In this paper, we propose a deep learning method that considers image background factors and analyzes the proposed method with explainable deep learning for explainability. The essential idea is to remove the image background, improve the pneumonia recognition accuracy, and apply the Grad-CAM method to obtain an explainable deep learning model for pneumonia identification. In the proposed approach, (1) preliminary deep learning models for pneumonia X-ray image identification without considering the background are built; (2) deep learning models for pneumonia X-ray image identification with background consideration are built to improve the accuracy of pneumonia identification; (3) Grad-CAM method is employed to analyze the explainability. The proposed approach improves the accuracy of pneumonia identification, and the highest accuracy of VGG16 reaches 95.6%. The proposed approach can be applied to real pneumonia identification for early detection and treatment.