The chest X-ray is one of the most commonly accessible radiological examinations for screening and diagnosis of many lung diseases. A tremendous number of X-ray imaging studies accompanied by radiological reports are accumulated and stored in many modern hospitals' Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS). On the other side, it is still an open question how this type of hospital-size knowledge database containing invaluable imaging informatics (i.e., loosely labeled) can be used to facilitate the data-hungry deep learning paradigms in building truly large-scale high precision computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems. In this paper, we present a new chest X-ray database, namely "ChestX-ray8", which comprises 108,948 frontal-view X-ray images of 32,717 unique patients with the text-mined eight disease image labels (where each image can have multi-labels), from the associated radiological reports using natural language processing. Importantly, we demonstrate that these commonly occurring thoracic diseases can be detected and even spatially-located via a unified weakly-supervised multi-label image classification and disease localization framework, which is validated using our proposed dataset. Although the initial quantitative results are promising as reported, deep convolutional neural network based "reading chest X-rays" (i.e., recognizing and locating the common disease patterns trained with only image-level labels) remains a strenuous task for fully-automated high precision CAD systems.

本文介绍了一个新的胸部X光数据库，名为“ ChestX-ray8 ”，其中包括108948个患者的32,717个独特患者的前瞻性X光图像 和使用自然语言处理从相关放射学报告中提取的八个疾病图像标签。作者展示了这些常见的胸部疾病可以通过弱监督的多标签图像分类和疾病定位框架进行检测甚至空间定位，并证明了这一点。尽管初始数量结果报告良好，但基于深度卷积神经网络的“阅读胸部X射线”（仅通过图像级标签训练）仍然是完全自动化的高精度CAD系统的艰巨任务。

ChestX-ray8:医院规模的胸部X光数据库和关于常见胸部疾病弱监督分类和定位的基准测试