2021 International Conference on Nascent Technologies in Engineering (ICNTE 2021)
Pneumonia Detection using Deep Learning
Swapnil Singh
Computer Engineering
Mukesh Patel School of Technology, Management and Engineering, NMIMS University
Mumbai, India
Swapnil.Singh49@nmims.edu.in
Abstract— It is observed that pneumonia is the largest cause of
death in toddlers. Early detection would facilitate in early treatment,
2021 4th Biennial International Conference on Nascent Technologies in Engineering (ICNTE) | 978-1-7281-9061-7/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICNTE51185.2021.9487731
hence, saving many lives. This paper intend to develop a method for
automating the detection of pneumonia using chest X-rays and
comparing convolutional neural network and multilevel perceptron.
Custom Convolutional neural network and multi-layer perceptron
were implemented on a chest X-ray dataset by Kaggle. A GUI was
created that accepts the chest X-ray and predicts the presence of
pneumonia and gives the congestion percentage. The model
accuracy was 92.63% and 77.56% for convolutional neural network
and multilayer perceptron respectively. The GUI developed gives
favourable outcomes. Convolutional neural network showed better
results as compared to multi-layer perceptron. Thus, the custom
convolutional neural network was used for the GUI.
Keywords— Deep Learning, Convolutional Neural Network,
Pneumonia Detection, Medical Imaging, Chest X-Ray, Automatic
Detection, Multi-Layer Perceptron
I. INTRODUCTION
Pneumonia is an acute respiratory lung infection. There are
small sacs called alveoli in the lungs, which fill up with air
when one breathes. When an individual is affected with
pneumonia, these sacs get filled up with pus and fluid, making
breathing painful and limiting the oxygen intake.
Patients with viral and bacterial pneumonia have similar
symptoms, though viral pneumonia has more symptoms than
bacterial pneumonia. Cough and/or difficult breathing, with or
without fever, are the symptoms shown by children under 5
years of age. Most prominent symptoms of pneumonia are fast
breathing, lower wall indrawing while inhalation. Generally,
wheezing accompanies these symptoms. Severely ill infants are
unable to eat and drink. They may also experience
unconsciousness, hypothermia, and convulsions.
Pneumonia is the single largest cause of death in children
worldwide. According to WHO pneumonia killed 8,08,694
children under the age of 5 in 2017, accounting for 15% of the
deaths of children under 5 years of age. Pneumonia is a common
disease in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa [22]. It can be
cured and prevented, by low-cost, low-tech medication and
care. Pneumonia is caused by bacteria, viruses, and fungi. The
transmission of the disease is in multiple ways. It can be air-
borne by the droplets released during sneezing and coughing, it
also spreads through blood, especially after birth of infants.
Children have these viruses and bacteria in their trachea which
when inhaled could lead to pneumonia. Parental smoking,
inhouse pollution, and living in a crowded house are the leading
environmental reasons for causing pneumonia.
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Pneumonia can be cured easily if there is efficient and early
detection. There are more than 1,27,000 cases in 2018 alone in
India [23], considering the large numbers there is a need for a
faster and efficient way to detect pneumonia. Pneumonia has
also been one of the early symptoms of numerous pandemics,
thus an efficient and faster detection would help in defeating the
pandemic.
The advent of technology in the medical field has helped in
fighting many diseases. Machine learning and deep learning
have helped to detect diseases at early stages, and also cater to
a larger group of patients. Deep learning models could be
collaborated to provide a good accuracy for the automated
detection process. The dataset should contain all features and
enough images to provide enough data for training and
evaluating the model.
II. RELATED WORK
In recent years there have been multiple works on the
detection of pneumonia and other respiratory diseases using
deep learning. The related work describes the use of
convolutional neural networks, transfer learning, and stochastic
gradient descent for the detection of pneumonia. Rajpurkar, et
al. [1] (2017) used a 121 layered convolutional neural network
and chest X-ray 14 dataset to develop an algorithm that can
detect pneumonia from chest X rays at a level exceeding
practicing radiologist. The patient history and lateral
radiographs could be taken into consideration to improve their
model.
Rajaraman, et al. [3] (2018) used the CXRs of children from
1 to 5 years of age, to work on a novel visualization strategy to
localize the region of interest that is considered relevant for the
model predictions across all the input that belong to an expected
class using a convolutional neural network. Zech, et al. [5]
(2018) aimed at finding the performance of convolutional
neural networks generalized over three different hospital
systems for a simulated pneumonia screening task. They
utilized datasets from NIH, Indiana University Network of
patient care, and Mount Sinai Hospital in their study.
Asnaoui, et al. [7] (2020) displayed a comparison of
recently developed deep convolutional neural networks for
binary classification of pneumonia images. They were able to
achieve an accuracy of 96% on chest X-ray and CT dataset.
Antin, et al. [8] (2017) aimed to train a model using the dataset
to help physicians in making diagnoses of pneumonia in chest
X-ray using a 121 layered convolutional neural network on NIH
chest X-ray dataset. Their model could be improved by
 2021 International Conference on Nascent Technologies in Engineering (ICNTE 2021)
considering various combinations of features, improving the
logistic regression baseline, and including more error analysis.
Team [10] (2018) aimed for pneumonia classification and
localization in chest radiographs using stochastic gradient
descent on a dataset of 3000 chest radiographs part of the 2018
RSNA Pneumonia challenge. The model can be applied to other
medical imaging fields. Xianghong Gu, et al. [11] (2018)
proposed a novel CAD system to identify bacterial and viral
pneumonia in chest X-rays using deep conventional neural
network working on chest X-ray and CT dataset. Feature
extraction and tuning of the deep conventional neural network
could lead to better performance.
Rahman, et al. [14] (2020) aimed to construct a system that
could detect bacterial and viral pneumonia using X-ray images.
They worked on 5247 X-ray images using convolutional neural
networks giving an accuracy of 95%. Stephen, et al. [15] (2019)
used a collection of 5856 chest X-ray images to train a
convolutional neural network made from scratch to classify and
detect the presence of pneumonia. The model could be further
trained to differentiate between pneumonia and lung cancer.
Setiawan, et al. [16] (2020) discussed the detection of
pneumonia through x-ray images using a convolutional neural
network. They worked on the chest X-ray dataset by Kaggle
providing an accuracy of 96.30%. X. Li, et al. [17] (2020)
presented an improved convolutional neural network for
pneumonia detection. Working on the Chest X-ray dataset by
Kaggle they were able to get an accuracy of 91.41%.
Raheel Siddiqi [18] (2019) presented a novel, 18 layered
deep sequential convolutional neural network-based model that
is proven to outperform the state-of-the-art system for this task.
He worked on a dataset of 5856 chest x-ray images giving an
accuracy of 94.39%. Transferred training and fine-tuning
classification could lead to better performance of the model. H.
Sharma, et al. [19] (2020) proposed different deep
convolutional neural network architectures to extract features
from images of chest x-ray and classify the images to detect the
presence of pneumonia. Working on chest X-ray dataset by
Kaggle they got their accuracy in the range of 74.98% to
90.68%. Use of different optimizers and other data
augmentation techniques could improve the model.
III. DATASET
The dataset used for the paper is Chest X-ray by Kaggle.
[21]
A. Chest X-Ray Images (Pneumonia)
The dataset consists of 5,863 X-ray images in the jpg format
divided as normal and pneumonia. The dataset consisted of
anterior-posterior chest X-rays of pediatric patients in the age
group of 1 to 5. All these patients were from Children’s Medical
Center and Guangzhou Women. The chest x-rays were initially
screened for quality control. This dataset was retrieved from
Kaggle.[21] The data set consisted of 3 folders: train, test, and
val. Each containing subfolder normal and pneumonia.
IV. DATA AUGMENTATION
We can improve the performance of the model by
augmenting the dataset we are using. The process of increasing
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the amount and diversity of the dataset is known as data
augmentation. The most used operations are:
● Changing brightness levels
● Zooming
● Flipping
● Rotation
● Cropping
● Shearing
Due to insufficient data for validation, data augmentation
was used. The techniques used here are:
● Rotation by 30 degrees
● 20% zooming
● Horizontal shift by 10% of the width
● Vertical shift by 10% of the height
V. ALGORITHM
B. Convolutional Neural Network
A convolutional neural network (CNN/ConvNet) is a deep
learning algorithm that takes in images as input and assigns
importance to various aspects of the image. CNN requires very
little pre-processing. CNN image classifier takes an input,
processes it, and classifies it under certain categories.
The architecture of CNN is analogous to the neurons of the
human brain.
The input of the image is h x b x d, where h is the height of
the image, b is the breadth of the image and d is the dimensions
of the image. The value of d is 1 for grayscale and 3 for RGB
combination.
The convolutional neural network used for this paper is a
custom made ConvNet. A custom convolutional neural network
was used to develop a new model and see the performance of
the network.
The first convolutional layer is the input layer. The input
layer consisted of 32 neurons, stride of 1, relu was used as the
activation function, and the input is taken of the shape 150 x
150 x 1; followed by a max-pooling layer with 2 x 2 filter and
2 strides.
The second convolutional layer had 64 neurons, 1 stride,
and relu is used as the activation function. It then has a max-
pooling layer with a 2 x 2 filter and 2 strides. The third layer is
the same as the second convolutional layer. The fourth
convolutional layer contains 128 neurons, 1 stride, and relu as
the activation function and then a max-pooling layer with 2 x 2
filter and 2 strides. The fifth convolutional layer is of 256
neurons, 1 stride, and relu is the activation layer. Then, there is
a flatten layer that converts the 2D array to 1D array. The output
of the flatten layer was given as an input to a dense layer with
128 neurons and having activation function of relu. The last
layer contains a dense layer with 1 neuron and the activation
function is the sigmoid function.
 2021 International Conference on Nascent Technologies in Engineering (ICNTE 2021)

The model is compiled using adam optimizer, the loss
function used is binary cross-entropy and the matrix is
accuracy.
Relu stands for Rectified Linear Unit for non-linear
operations. It proposes to introduce non-linearity to CNN.
Stride is the number of pixels shifted over the input matrix.
When stride is 1 then we move the filter by 1 pixel at a time.
C. Multi-Level Perceptron
Artificial neural networks are usually referred to as neural
networks or multi-level perceptron. A perceptron is a single
neuron. A neural network with one or more than one hidden
layer is known as a multi-layer perceptron. In order to train a
neural network, we define a loss function. While training the
model we tend to optimize this loss function. A neural network
works backward from the output node iteratively updating the
coefficients of the nodes. This process is called backdrop or
backpropagation. A neural network requires an activation
function. The activation function used was sigmoid represented
by (1) and ReLU.

Fig. 1. Convolutional Neural Network

(1)
Butt, Charmaine, et al. [2] (2020) proposed a comparison
between multiple convolutional neural network models to
classify CT scan samples with COVID-19, influenza, viral The neural network built here had 5 layers. The input layer
pneumonia, or normal. They used 618 transverse section CT had 256 neurons, followed by three hidden layers with 128
scan samples giving an accuracy of 86.70%. Li, Lin, et al. [4] neurons, 64 neurons, and 32 neurons respectively. The output
(2020) developed a fully automatic framework using layer used sigmoid as activation function and had 1 neuron. Fig.
convolutional neural network to detect COVID-19 using CT 2 shows the shape of a 4-layer neural network.
scans and evaluated its performance. The worked on 4356 chest
CT scans exams from 3322 patients. They were able to achieve
an accuracy of 90%. Saraiva et al. [6] (2019) portrayed a
comparative classification of pneumonia using convolutional
neural network. The data set consisted of labeled optical
coherence Tomography and chest X-ray images and achieved
an accuracy of 95.30%. Maghdid et al. [9] (2020) deployed a
simple and effective model using deep learning and transferred
learning algorithms for the detection of COVID-19 using X-
Rays and CT Scan images. They used AlexNet network on a
dataset including images collected from 5 sources, the images
included 170 X-ray images and 361 CT images, and achieved
an accuracy of 94.10%. Apostolopoulos, Loannis, and Tzani
[12] (2020) portrayed the performance of recent state-of-art
convolutional neural network architectures for medical image
classification. They used 1427 X-ray images over transfer
learning and convolutional neural network. Chowdhary et al.
[13] (2020) worked on automating the detection process of
COVID-19 pneumonia patients using their X-ray images, along Fig. 2. Multilayer Perceptron
with that they worked on maximizing the accuracy of detection
using preprocessing and deep learning techniques on the VI. STRUCTURE
images. Their dataset had 1341 normal, 190 COVID-19, and Using the above stated deep learning model as back-end
1345 viral pneumonia chest X-ray images and got an accuracy mechanism, and a simple user-friendly user interface was built
of 98.3%. Narin, Ali, Ceren Kaya, and Ziynet Pamuk [20] for the doctors or even the patient himself/herself.
(2020) deployed three different convolutional neural networks-
The input image is to be of a Chest X-ray. This input image
based models for the detection of coronavirus pneumonia
would be applied to the trained model and then the model would
infected patients using chest X-ray images. They used 50
predict using the learnings from the features of the images used
COVID-19 X-rays and 50 normal X-rays and achieved an
during training phase of the model.
accuracy of 87%.

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 2021 International Conference on Nascent Technologies in Engineering (ICNTE 2021)

This model is further modified to provide the congestion neural network, we got the model accuracy as 92.63 %, whereas
percentage observed in the X-ray. This is done by considering after the execution of multi-layer perceptron, we got the model
the pixel intensities of the image. It was observed that the pixels accuracy as 77.56%.
showing congestion were found in the intensity range of 140 to
190. These pixels were found between pixel 20 and pixel 100
horizontally and between pixel 90 and pixel 130 vertically. It is TABLE I. CLASSIFICATION REPORT OF CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORK
to be noted that all the images were resized to the size of 150
pixel x 150 pixel Precisio
Recall F1 Score Support
n
This model would not only automatically detect pneumonia Pneumonia
0.91 0.98 0.94 390
but also would help us in fast and early detection of pneumonia. (Class 0)
Fig. 3 shows the GUI developed for the interface and Fig. 4 Normal
0.96 0.84 0.89 234
(Class 1)
shows the algorithm for the interface.

TABLE II. CLASSIFICATION REPORT OF MULTI-LAYER

PERCEPTRON
Precisio
Recall F1 Score Support
n
Pneumonia
0.79 0.95 0.86 390
(Class 0)
Normal
0.86 0.57 0.69 234
(Class 1)

TABLE III. CONFUSION MATRIX OF CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL

NETWORK

382 8
38 196

TABLE IV. CONFUSION MATRIX OF MULTI-LAYER PERCEPTRON

369 21
81 153

Table I describes the classification report whereas table III

Fig. 3. Detection GUI
describes the confusion matrix of convolutional neural network.
Table II describes the classification resort whereas table IV
describes the confusion matrix of multilayer perceptron.

Fig. 5. Visualization of the training and testing accuracy and loss of the
convolutional neural network
Fig. 4. Algorithm for the GUI

VII. RESULT
There were 1,244,225 parameters to train in convolutional
neural network whereas multi-level perceptron had 5,803,521
parameters to train. After the execution of the convolutional

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 2021 International Conference on Nascent Technologies in Engineering (ICNTE 2021)

Fig. 6. Visualization of the training and testing accuracy and loss of the multi-
layer perceptron

Fig. 5 and 6 visualize the training and testing accuracies of

convolutional neural network and multilayer perceptron
respectively. The training loss is seen to be decreasing whereas
the training accuracy is seen to be increasing. There is variation
seen in the testing loss and accuracy. The model was trained for
50 epochs, the training was stopped after 50 epochs as no
significant increase in the accuracy was seen; Thus, we can see Fig. 8. Incorrect Predition for Convolutional Neural Network
that there is some continuity at the end of the epochs. The
validation accuracy and loss curves are not smooth due to the
insufficient amount of validation data, though data
augmentation was used to increase the dataset.

Fig. 9. Correct Predition for Multi-Layer Perceptron

Fig. 7. Correct Predition for Convolutional Neural Network

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 2021 International Conference on Nascent Technologies in Engineering (ICNTE 2021)
Fig. 10. Inorrect Predition for Multi-Layer Perceptron
Fig. 7 and 9 depict correct prediction examples of
convolutional neural network and multilayer perceptron
respectively, whereas Fig. 8 and 10 depict incorrect prediction
examples of convolutional neural network and multilayer
perceptron respectively. The images in Fig 8 and 10 have very
less amount of chest congestion (seen as the white colour in the
lung region), thus it looks similar to a normal chest x-ray. While
maxpooling the maximum value is chosen, since brighter pixels
would have a higher value than the darker pixels, so the value
of brighter pixels is taken, thus it seems that there is chest
congestion.
VIII. RESULT
This paper depicts a method for the detection of pneumonia
using convolutional neural networks (CNN). The results of the
model show an accuracy of 92.63% for convolutional neural
network and an accuracy of 77.56% for multilayer perceptron,
showing that the convolutional neural network is efficient for
detecting pneumonia. The dataset used for this paper is chest X-
ray dataset from Kaggle, this dataset contains paediatric
radiography, hence the model could be implemented for
medical applications. Seeing the rise of epidemics in recent
years, we need to be prepared for such diseases. The model
could be trained using chest X-rays and CT scans of COVID-
19 patients, thus providing an efficient and fast mechanism for
detecting COVID-19. A dataset with more sample images
would help in attaining better results for the model.
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