Tuberculosis (TB) is a major global health threat, causing millions of deaths annually. Although early diagnosis and treatment can greatly improve the chances of survival, it remains a major challenge, especially in developing countries. Recently, computer-aided tuberculosis diagnosis (CTD) using deep learning has shown promise, but progress is hindered by limited training data. To address this, we establish a large-scale dataset, namely the Tuberculosis X-ray (TBX11K) dataset, which contains 11,200 chest X-ray (CXR) images with corresponding bounding box annotations for TB areas. This dataset enables the training of sophisticated detectors for high-quality CTD. Furthermore, we propose a strong baseline, SymFormer, for simultaneous CXR image classification and TB infection area detection. SymFormer incorporates Symmetric Search Attention (SymAttention) to tackle the bilateral symmetry property of CXR images for learning discriminative features. Since CXR images may not strictly adhere to the bilateral symmetry property, we also propose Symmetric Positional Encoding (SPE) to facilitate SymAttention through feature recalibration. To promote future research on CTD, we build a benchmark by introducing evaluation metrics, evaluating baseline models reformed from existing detectors, and running an online challenge. Experiments show that SymFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on the TBX11K dataset. The data, code, and models will be released.

结核病是全球主要的健康威胁，深度学习在计算机辅助结核病诊断方面取得了进展，但训练数据有限。为此，本文建立了一个大规模数据集 TBX11K，其中包含11200个带有肺结核区域边界框标注的胸部 X 光图像。此数据集可用于训练高质量计算机辅助结核病诊断模型，并提出了一种基准模型 SymFormer，通过对 CXR 图像的边界对称性进行处理来学习判别性特征。SymFormer 在 TBX11K 数据集上取得了最先进的性能，并提供了数据、代码和模型。

重新审视计算机辅助结核病诊断