Computer-Aided Diagnosis for Pneumoconiosis Staging Based on Multi-scale Feature Mapping

In this research, we explored a method of multi-scale feature mapping to pre-screen radiographs quickly and accurately in the aided diagnosis of pneumoconiosis staging. We utilized an open dataset and a self-collected dataset as research datasets. We proposed a multi-scale feature mapping model based on deep learning feature extraction technology for detecting pulmonary fibrosis and a discrimination method for pneumoconiosis staging. The diagnostic accuracy was evaluated using under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. The AUC value of our model was 0.84, which showed the best performance compared with previous work on datasets. The diagnosis results indicated that our method was highly consistent with that of clinical experts on real patient. Furthermore, the AUC value obtained through categories I-IV on the testing dataset demonstrated that categories I (AUC = 0.86) and IV (AUC = 0.82) obtained the best performance and achieved the level of clinician categorization. Our research could be applied to the pre-screening and diagnosis of pneumoconiosis in the clinic.