  Lung disease is common throughout the world. These include chronic
obstructive pulmonary disease, pneumonia, asthma, tuberculosis, fibrosis, etc.
Timely diagnosis of lung disease is essential. Many image processing and
machine learning models have been developed for this purpose. Different forms
of existing deep learning techniques including convolutional neural network
(CNN), vanilla neural network, visual geometry group based neural network
(VGG), and capsule network are applied for lung disease prediction.The basic
CNN has poor performance for rotated, tilted, or other abnormal image
orientation. Therefore, we propose a new hybrid deep learning framework by
combining VGG, data augmentation and spatial transformer network (STN) with
CNN. This new hybrid method is termed here as VGG Data STN with CNN (VDSNet).
As implementation tools, Jupyter Notebook, Tensorflow, and Keras are used. The
new model is applied to NIH chest X-ray image dataset collected from Kaggle
repository. Full and sample versions of the dataset are considered. For both
full and sample datasets, VDSNet outperforms existing methods in terms of a
number of metrics including precision, recall, F0.5 score and validation
accuracy. For the case of full dataset, VDSNet exhibits a validation accuracy
of 73%, while vanilla gray, vanilla RGB, hybrid CNN and VGG, and modified
capsule network have accuracy values of 67.8%, 69%, 69.5%, 60.5% and 63.8%,
respectively. When sample dataset rather than full dataset is used, VDSNet
requires much lower training time at the expense of a slightly lower validation
accuracy. Hence, the proposed VDSNet framework will simplify the detection of
lung disease for experts as well as for doctors.
