iWBFCxr: improved weighted box fusion for analyzing chest x ray images for enhancing thoracic abnormalities

Chest x-ray studies can be automatically detected and their locations located using artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. To detect the location of findings, additional annotation in the form of bounding boxes is required, rather than image-level labeling. Accurate interpretation of chest radiographs is essential for diagnosing thoracic abnormalities. This paper introduces a novel method for abnormality detection in chest radiographs using the VinDr-CXR dataset. Labeled training sets are improved by incorporating data augmentation and advanced pre-processing techniques. To improve the accuracy of anomaly identification, the study makes use of ensemble object detection models, such as the modified weighted boxes fusion (iWBFCxr) technique. With an average precision (AP) of 0.2434 for class 14, experimental results on the VinDr-CXR dataset show an overall mean average precision (mAP) of 0.2791. The iWBFCxr approach, when combined with ensemble predictions, has the potential to improve abnormality localization. By integrating enhanced label merging with ensemble object detection models, our method improves abnormality localization in chest radiographs significantly, improving thoracic abnormality diagnosis accuracy and possibly leading to new medical interventions.