Improving Chest X-Ray Classification by RNN-based Patient Monitoring

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel RNN-based approach that leverages patient history to improve chest X-ray classification accuracy, demonstrating significant performance gains over traditional image-only models.

Contribution

The study presents a new dataset and a combined CNN-RNN model that utilizes patient history, advancing automated chest X-ray analysis beyond single-image classification.

Findings

Patient history improves classification accuracy

Combined CNN-RNN model outperforms CNN alone

Code and dataset are publicly available

Abstract

Chest X-Ray imaging is one of the most common radiological tools for detection of various pathologies related to the chest area and lung function. In a clinical setting, automated assessment of chest radiographs has the potential of assisting physicians in their decision making process and optimize clinical workflows, for example by prioritizing emergency patients. Most work analyzing the potential of machine learning models to classify chest X-ray images focuses on vision methods processing and predicting pathologies for one image at a time. However, many patients undergo such a procedure multiple times during course of a treatment or during a single hospital stay. The patient history, that is previous images and especially the corresponding diagnosis contain useful information that can aid a classification system in its prediction. In this study, we analyze how information about diagnosis can improve CNN-based image classification models by constructing a novel dataset from the well studied CheXpert dataset of chest X-rays. We show that a model trained on additional patient history information outperforms a model trained without the information by a significant margin. We provide code to replicate the dataset creation and model training.