Enhancing Pneumonia Diagnosis Through Chest Imaging and Machine Learning A Comprehensive Ensemble Approach with Diverse CNN Architectures

Abstract

Abstract: This research presents a novel approach for pneumonia diagnosis in chest X-ray images utilizing an ensemble of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The proposed system integrates state-of-the-art architectures such as ResNet, DenseNet, InceptionV3, MobileNet, and AlexNet, helping transfer learning to fine-tune these models on a curated chest X-ray dataset obtained from Kaggle. The dataset comprises two classes: normal and pneumonia. The ensemble methodology combines the predictive strengths of individual CNN models, harnessing their diverse feature extraction capabilities. A key innovation lies in the incorporation of the AlexNet architecture into the ensemble, aiming to further enhance the ensemble's discriminative power. The system undergoes a comprehensive training, validation, and testing pipeline, culminating in real-time predictions on new chest X-ray images. The experimental results showcase the effectiveness of the ensemble approach, demonstrating improved accuracy and robustness in pneumonia detection compared to individual models. The incorporation of AlexNet contributes unique features to the ensemble, ighlighting the potential of diverse model architectures in enhancing diagnostic performance