AUTOMATED PNEUMONIA IDENTIFICATION THROUGH CNN-BASED ANALYSIS

Abstract

Pneumonia, a condition caused by infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, or parasites, results in lung infections and the accumulation of pus in affected tissues. Incorrect diagnosis or improper treatment can significantly impact a patient's quality of life. This project focuses on the precise identification and categorization of pneumonia-afflicted patients through the analysis of their chest X-rays. Leveraging advancements in deep learning, healthcare experts can make more accurate diagnostic decisions for various illnesses. This study presents an innovative approach utilizing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to predict and distinguish between patients affected by pneumonia and those who are not, based on chest X-ray images. The methodology involves a series of convolutional and max pooling layers activated using the ReLU activation function. Subsequently, the processed data is passed through dense layers, culminating in the activation of the output neuron through the sigmoidal function. During the training process, the model exhibits increasing accuracy and decreasing loss, demonstrating its effectiveness. To prevent overfitting, data augmentation techniques are applied before model fitting. These strategies collectively enhance the robustness and reliability of the deep learning models, resulting in accurate and persuasive detection of pneumonia from chest X-ray images. Keywords: Pneumonia, CNN, VGG-16, VGG-19, Chest X-rays, Classification, Deeep learning, Data augmenatation, ReLU, softmax.