Attention mechanism-based model for cardiomegaly recognition in chest X-Ray images

Recently, cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) have become a rapidly growing problem in the world, especially in developing countries. The latter are facing a lifestyle change that introduces new risk factors for heart disease, that requires a particular and urgent interest. Besides, cardiomegaly is a sign of cardiovascular diseases that refers to various conditions; it is associated with the heart enlargement that can be either transient or permanent depending on certain conditions. Furthermore, cardiomegaly is visible on any imaging test including Chest X-Radiation (X-Ray) images; which are one of the most common tools used by Cardiologists to detect and diagnose many diseases. In this paper, we propose an innovative deep learning (DL) model based on an attention module and MobileNet architecture to recognize Cardiomegaly patients using the popular Chest X-Ray8 dataset. Actually, the attention module captures the spatial relationship between the relevant regions in Chest X-Ray images. The experimental results show that the proposed model achieved interesting results with an accuracy rate of 81% which makes it suitable for detecting cardiomegaly disease.