Early diagnosis of lung conditions is crucial for effective treatment and improving patient health. However, traditional diagnostic methods using chest X-ray images have some notable drawbacks, such as overlapping anatomical structures obscuring areas of interest, the presence of noise potentially masking abnormalities, and low contrast diminishing differentiation. In this research undertaking, we explored an enhanced MobileNetV2 approach to augmenting the accuracy of diagnosing multiple concomitant lung pathologies. We employed an inclusive methodology, incorporating several progressive steps. We leveraged contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization to heighten the clarity of the dataset’s images. Bilateral filtering was applied to refine contrast and sharpness, along with utilizing a dense convolutional neural network. Additional techniques were utilized as well, such as image standardization, Gaussian blur, and histogram equalization, to further increase contrast and reduce noise. This was performed through rotations, scaling, horizontal flipping, brightness adjustment, elastic transformations, and random cropping and padding to generate more realistic exemplars. We defined and compiled a purpose-specific MobileNetV2 architecture for this research endeavor. The model was evaluated based on several metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and specificity, after every epoch, to refine the training process. We used Bayesian optimization for more efficient fine-tuning of the model. Conditional random fields and ensemble averaging methods were employed for postprocessing. These enhancements led to superior results. After image enhancement, the model achieved an accuracy of 99.20 %, with a precision of 98.90 %, a recall of 99.10 %, and an F1-score of 99.00 %. The specificity of the predictions reached 99.40 %. These improvements assist medical workers in making more informed decisions. However, it is important to note that the current algorithm does not influence the effectiveness of treatment or recovery from the condition.
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