Hybrid Inception Architecture with Residual Connection: Fine-tuned Inception-ResNet Deep Learning Model for Lung Inflammation Diagnosis from Chest Radiographs

Diagnosing lung inflammation, particularly pneumonia, is of paramount importance for effectively treating and managing the disease. Pneumonia is a common respiratory infection caused by bacteria, viruses, or fungi and can indiscriminately affect people of all ages. As highlighted by the World Health Organization (WHO), this prevalent disease tragically accounts for a substantial 15% of global mortality in children under five years of age. This article presents a comparative study of the Inception-ResNet deep learning model's performance in diagnosing pneumonia from chest radiographs. The study leverages Mendeleys chest X-ray images dataset, which contains 5856 2D images, including both Viral and Bacterial Pneumonia X-ray images. The Inception-ResNet model is compared with seven other state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and the experimental results demonstrate the Inception-ResNet model's superiority in extracting essential features and saving computation runtime. Furthermore, we examine the impact of transfer learning with fine-tuning in improving the performance of deep convolutional models. This study provides valuable insights into using deep learning models for pneumonia diagnosis and highlights the potential of the Inception-ResNet model in this field. In classification accuracy, Inception-ResNet-V2 showed superior performance compared to other models, including ResNet152V2, MobileNet-V3 (Large and Small), EfficientNetV2 (Large and Small), InceptionV3, and NASNet-Mobile, with substantial margins. It outperformed them by 2.6%, 6.5%, 7.1%, 13%, 16.1%, 3.9%, and 1.6%, respectively, demonstrating its significant advantage in accurate classification.