# Tips and Tricks to Improve CNN-based Chest X-ray Diagnosis: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.00997 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00997/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [High-Performance Large-Scale Image Recognition Without Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06171/) (2021)
- [PadChest: A large chest x-ray image dataset with multi-label annotated reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07441/) (2019)
- [Embracing Imperfect Datasets: A Review of Deep Learning Solutions for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10454/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning for Chest X-ray Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08700/) (2021)
- [MoCo-CXR: MoCo Pretraining Improves Representation and Transferability of Chest X-ray Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05352/) (2020)
- [Disentangling Human Error from the Ground Truth in Segmentation of Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15963/) (2020)
- [CheXtransfer: Performance and Parameter Efficiency of ImageNet Models for Chest X-Ray Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06871/) (2021)
- [MADGAN: unsupervised Medical Anomaly Detection GAN using multiple adjacent brain MRI slice reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13559/) (2020)
- [Y-Net: Joint Segmentation and Classification for Diagnosis of Breast Biopsy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01313/) (2018)
- [Post-DAE: Anatomically Plausible Segmentation via Post-Processing with Denoising Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13791/) (2020)
- [Interactive segmentation of medical images through fully convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08205/) (2019)
- [Synthesizing Diverse Lung Nodules Wherever Massively: 3D Multi-Conditional GAN-based CT Image Augmentation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04962/) (2019)
- [A Two-Stream Mutual Attention Network for Semi-supervised Biomedical Segmentation with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11719/) (2018)
- [Image to Images Translation for Multi-Task Organ Segmentation and Bone Suppression in Chest X-Ray Radiography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10089/) (2019)
- [Caveats in Generating Medical Imaging Labels from Radiology Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02283/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Multi-Task Learning With Chest X-Ray Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03693/) (2019)
- [Learning More with Less: Conditional PGGAN-based Data Augmentation for Brain Metastases Detection Using Highly-Rough Annotation on MR Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09856/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) intrinsically requires large-scale data whereas Chest X-Ray (CXR) images tend to be data/annotation-scarce, leading to over-fitting. Therefore, based on our development experience and related work, this paper thoroughly introduces tricks to improve generalization in the CXR diagnosis: how to (i) leverage additional data, (ii) augment/distillate data, (iii) regularize training, and (iv) conduct efficient segmentation. As a development example based on such optimization techniques, we also feature LPIXEL's CNN-based CXR solution, EIRL Chest Nodule, which improved radiologists/non-radiologists' nodule detection sensitivity by 0.100/0.131, respectively, while maintaining specificity.