# Taxlifier: Leveraging Disease Taxonomy for Enhanced Multi-Label Classification in Chest Radiography

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05628 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05628/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02315/) (2017)
- [PadChest: A large chest x-ray image dataset with multi-label annotated reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07441/) (2019)
- [TorchXRayVision: A library of chest X-ray datasets and models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00595/) (2021)
- [HDLTex: Hierarchical Deep Learning for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08267/) (2017)
- [Thoracic Disease Identification and Localization with Limited Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06373/) (2017)
- [Diagnose like a Radiologist: Attention Guided Convolutional Neural Network for Thorax Disease Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09927/) (2018)
- [Tree-CNN: A Hierarchical Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05800/) (2018)
- [Weakly Supervised Deep Learning for Thoracic Disease Classification and Localization on Chest X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06067/) (2018)
- [Abnormality Detection and Localization in Chest X-Rays using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09850/) (2017)
- [SDFN: Segmentation-based Deep Fusion Network for Thoracic Disease Classification in Chest X-ray Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12959/) (2018)
- [Automatic Lung Cancer Prediction from Chest X-ray Images Using Deep Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10858/) (2018)
- [Iterative Attention Mining for Weakly Supervised Thoracic Disease Pattern Localization in Chest X-Rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00958/) (2018)
- [Deep Hiearchical Multi-Label Classification Applied to Chest X-Ray Abnormality Taxonomies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05609/) (2020)
- [Multi-task Learning for Chest X-ray Abnormality Classification on Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06362/) (2019)
- [TaxoKnow: Taxonomy as Prior Knowledge in the Loss Function of Multi-class Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16341/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate and efficient classification of thoracic diseases in chest X-ray (CXR) images is crucial for timely diagnosis and treatment. However, the presence of multiple pathologies with overlapping visual characteristics poses significant challenges for automated classification systems. In this study, we propose two novel hierarchical multi-label classification techniques, namely the loss-based and logit-based methods, to address these challenges by leveraging the hierarchical relationships among different thoracic pathologies. The loss-based technique integrates hierarchical information directly into the optimization process, while the logit-based method adjusts the predicted probabilities of each class based on its parent class in the disease taxonomy. We evaluate the performance of both techniques using three large-scale CXR datasets: CheXpert (224,316 CXRs), PADCHEST (160,000 CXRs), and NIH (112,120 CXRs). The experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy, AUC, and F1 scores compared to the baseline method across various pathologies. The logit-based and loss-based methods improve accuracy by 12% and 11%, AUC by 13% and 10%, and F1 scores by 24% and 12%, respectively compared to the baseline. These results represent a substantial improvement over the baseline method. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive statistical analysis to validate the robustness and reliability of the proposed techniques. The integration of domain-specific hierarchical knowledge not only enhances the classification performance but also provides a more interpretable output for clinical decision support. Our findings highlight the potential of hierarchical multi-label classification in advancing computer-aided diagnosis systems for chest radiography.