Deep Learning for Computer-aided Diagnosis of Pneumoconiosis

Abstract Background: The diagnosis of pneumoconiosis relies primarily on chest radiographs and exhibits significant variability between physicians. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) can improve the accuracy and consistency of these diagnoses. However, CAD based on machine learning requires extensive human intervention and time-consuming training. As such, deep learning has become a popular tool for the development of CAD models. In this study, the clinical applicability of CAD based on deep learning was verified for pneumoconiosis patients.Methods: Chest radiographs were collected from 5424 occupational health examiners who met the inclusion criteria. The data were divided into training, validation, and test sets. The CAD algorithm was then trained and applied to processing of the validation set, while the test set was used to evaluate diagnostic efficacy. Three junior and three senior physicians provided independent diagnoses using images from the test set and a comprehensive diagnosis for comparison with the CAD results. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to evaluate the diagnostic efficiency of the proposed CAD system. A McNemar test was used to evaluate diagnostic sensitivity and specificity for pneumoconiosis, both before and after the use of CAD. A kappa consistency test was used to evaluate the diagnostic consistency for both the algorithm and the clinicians.Results: ROC results suggested the proposed CAD model achieved high accuracy in the diagnosis of pneumoconiosis, with a kappa value of 0.90. The sensitivity, specificity, and kappa values for the junior doctors increased from 0.86 to 0.98, 0.68 to 0.86, and 0.54 to 0.84, respectively (p<0.05), when CAD was applied. However, metrics for the senior doctors were not significantly different.Conclusion: DL-based CAD can improve the diagnostic sensitivity, specificity, and consistency of pneumoconiosis diagnoses, particularly for junior physicians.