BB-GCN: A Bi-modal Bridged Graph Convolutional Network for Multi-label Chest X-Ray Recognition

Multi-label chest X-ray (CXR) recognition involves simultaneously diagnosing and identifying multiple labels for different pathologies. Since pathological labels have rich information about their relationship to each other, modeling the co-occurrence dependencies between pathological labels is essential to improve recognition performance. However, previous methods rely on state variable coding and attention mechanisms-oriented to model local label information, and lack learning of global co-occurrence relationships between labels. Furthermore, these methods roughly integrate image features and label embedding, ignoring the alignment and compactness problems in cross-modal vector fusion.To solve these problems, a Bi-modal Bridged Graph Convolutional Network (BB-GCN) model is proposed. This model mainly consists of a backbone module, a pathology Label Co-occurrence relationship Embedding (LCE) module, and a Transformer Bridge Graph (TBG) module. Specifically, the backbone module obtains image visual feature representation. The LCE module utilizes a graph to model the global co-occurrence relationship between multiple labels and employs graph convolutional networks for learning inference. The TBG module bridges the cross-modal vectors more compactly and efficiently through the GroupSum method.We have evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed BB-GCN in two large-scale CXR datasets (ChestX-Ray14 and CheXpert). Our model achieved state-of-the-art performance: the mean AUC scores for the 14 pathologies were 0.835 and 0.813, respectively.The proposed LCE and TBG modules can jointly effectively improve the recognition performance of BB-GCN. Our model also achieves satisfactory results in multi-label chest X-ray recognition and exhibits highly competitive generalization performance.