Nanochest-net: A simple convolutional network for radiological studies classification

The new coronavirus disease (COVID-19), pneumonia, tuberculosis, and breast cancer have one thing in common: these diseases can be diagnosed using radiological studies such as X-rays images. With radiological studies and technology, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) results in a very useful technique to analyze and detect abnormalities using the images generated by X-ray machines. Some deep-learning techniques such as a convolutional neural network (CNN) can help physicians to obtain an effective pre-diagnosis. However, popular CNNs are enormous models and need a huge amount of data to obtain good results. In this paper, we introduce NanoChest-net, which is a small but effective CNN model that can be used to classify among different diseases using images from radiological studies. NanoChest-net proves to be effective in classifying among different diseases such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, and COVID-19. In two of the five datasets used in the experiments, NanoChest-net obtained the best results, while on the remaining datasets our model proved to be as good as baseline models from the state of the art such as the ResNet50, Xception, and DenseNet121. In addition, NanoChest-net is useful to classify radiological studies on the same level as state-of-the-art algorithms with the advantage that it does not require a large number of operations.