Automatic screening for tuberculosis in chest radiographs: a survey

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major global health threat. An estimated one-third of the world’s population has been exposed to TB, and millions of new infections are occurring every year. The advent of new powerful hardware and software techniques has triggered attempts to develop computer-aided diagnostic systems for TB detection in support of inexpensive mass screening in developing countries. In this paper, we describe the medical background of TB detection in chest X-rays and present a survey of the recent approaches using computer-aided detection. After a thorough research of the computer science literature for such systems or related methods, we were able to identify 16 papers, including our own, written between 1996 and early 2013. These papers show that TB screening is a challenging task and an open research problem. We report on the progress to date and describe experimental screening systems that have been developed.