Transfer learning approach for pediatric pneumonia diagnosis using channel attention deep CNN architectures

Chest X-ray is the most commonly adopted non-invasive and painless diagnostic test for pediatric pneumonia. However, the low radiation levels for diagnosis make accurate detection challenging, and this initiates the need for an unerring computer-aided diagnosis model. Our work proposes stacking ensemble learning on features extracted from channel attention deep CNN architectures. The features extracted from the channel attentionbased ResNet50V2, ResNet101V2, ResNet152V2, Xception, and DenseNet169 are individually passed through Kernel PCA for dimensionality reduction and concatenated. A stacking classifier with Support Vector Classifier, Logistic Regression, K-Nearest Neighbour, Nu-SVC, and XGBClassifier is employed for the final- Normal and Pneumonia classification. The stacking classifier achieves an accuracy of 96.15%, precision of 97.91%, recall of 95.90%, F1 score of 96.89%, and an AUC score of 96.24% on the publicly available pediatric pneumonia dataset. We expect this model to help the real-time diagnosis of pediatric pneumonia significantly.