  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. Data download link:
https://nihcc.app.box.com/v/ChestXray-NIHCC
