A Comparative Study of GAN-Based Deep Learning Models for Pneumonia Detection in Chest X-Rays

This study evaluates pneumonia classification in chest X-rays using VGG19, MobileNetV2, ResNet50, and a custom CNN, and explores Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based synthetic data augmentation. MobileNetV2 achieved the highest reported accuracy of 88% with balanced class-wise performance. The custom CNN achieved pneumonia recall of 92.67% and precision of 79.43%, highlighting a precision-recall trade-off. Accuracy, F1-score, precision, recall, confusion matrices, and training curves were used to assess performance. Synthetic pneumonia images were combined with real images to investigate whether augmentation could improve classification performance. In the reported VGG19 comparison, augmented-data training accuracy reached approximately 100%, while validation accuracy remained near 50%, below the real-data validation accuracy. This experiment therefore did not demonstrate a validation-performance benefit from GAN augmentation. The classifier comparison highlights differences in accuracy and pneumonia recall, while the augmentation experiment indicates the need for further evaluation of synthetic-image quality and training settings.