An Incremental Learning Approach to Automatically Recognize Pulmonary Diseases from the Multi-vendor Chest Radiographs

Pulmonary diseases can cause severe respiratory problems, leading to sudden death if not treated timely. Many researchers have utilized deep learning systems to diagnose pulmonary disorders using chest X-rays (CXRs). However, such systems require exhaustive training efforts on large-scale data to effectively diagnose chest abnormalities. Furthermore, procuring such large-scale data is often infeasible and impractical, especially for rare diseases. With the recent advances in incremental learning, researchers have periodically tuned deep neural networks to learn different classification tasks with few training examples. Although, such systems can resist catastrophic forgetting, they treat the knowledge representations independently of each other, and this limits their classification performance. Also, to the best of our knowledge, there is no incremental learning-driven image diagnostic framework that is specifically designed to screen pulmonary disorders from the CXRs. To address this, we present a novel framework that can learn to screen different chest abnormalities incrementally. In addition to this, the proposed framework is penalized through an incremental learning loss function that infers Bayesian theory to recognize structural and semantic inter-dependencies between incrementally learned knowledge representations to diagnose the pulmonary diseases effectively, regardless of the scanner specifications. We tested the proposed framework on five public CXR datasets containing different chest abnormalities, where it outperformed various state-of-the-art system through various metrics.