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Reseach Article

Reducing False Alarms in Automated Chest X-ray Diagnosis: A Two-Stage System that Outperforms YOLOv5 and Faster R-CNN

by Amar Debnath, Sarker T. Ahmed Rumee, Eity Modhu, M. Murshida Mahbub
International Journal of Applied Information Systems
Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA
Volume 13 - Number 4
Year of Publication: 2026
Authors: Amar Debnath, Sarker T. Ahmed Rumee, Eity Modhu, M. Murshida Mahbub
10.5120/ijais613be81792f7

Amar Debnath, Sarker T. Ahmed Rumee, Eity Modhu, M. Murshida Mahbub . Reducing False Alarms in Automated Chest X-ray Diagnosis: A Two-Stage System that Outperforms YOLOv5 and Faster R-CNN. International Journal of Applied Information Systems. 13, 4 ( Aug 2026), 1-13. DOI=10.5120/ijais613be81792f7

@article{ 10.5120/ijais613be81792f7,
author = { Amar Debnath, Sarker T. Ahmed Rumee, Eity Modhu, M. Murshida Mahbub },
title = { Reducing False Alarms in Automated Chest X-ray Diagnosis: A Two-Stage System that Outperforms YOLOv5 and Faster R-CNN },
journal = { International Journal of Applied Information Systems },
issue_date = { Aug 2026 },
volume = { 13 },
number = { 4 },
month = { Aug },
year = { 2026 },
issn = { 2249-0868 },
pages = { 1-13 },
numpages = {9},
url = { https://www.ijais.org/archives/volume13/number4/reducing-false-alarms-in-automated-chest-x-ray-diagnosis-a-two-stage-system-that-outperforms-yolov5-and-faster-r-cnn/ },
doi = { 10.5120/ijais613be81792f7 },
publisher = {Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA},
address = {New York, USA}
}
%0 Journal Article
%1 2026-08-24T20:50:46.228570+05:30
%A Amar Debnath
%A Sarker T. Ahmed Rumee
%A Eity Modhu
%A M. Murshida Mahbub
%T Reducing False Alarms in Automated Chest X-ray Diagnosis: A Two-Stage System that Outperforms YOLOv5 and Faster R-CNN
%J International Journal of Applied Information Systems
%@ 2249-0868
%V 13
%N 4
%P 1-13
%D 2026
%I Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA
Abstract

Chest X-ray diagnosis is delayed because of the increasing workload faced by radiologists and the intrinsic tendency of deep learning models to produce false positive detections. This paper proposes a lightweight multi-modal deep learning framework to address these challenges. Potential disease regions are identified using a YOLOv5 object detector, and a binary classifier based on an EfficientNet architecture with transfer learning is employed. The main role of the classifier is to remove the detector’s false positive predictions. On the VinDr-CXR benchmark (18k chest X-rays, 14 abnormality types, expert bounding boxes), the proposed system obtains a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.246. This results in a relative improvement of 69% over the baseline YOLOv5 detector (mAP 0.145) and is significantly better than the performance of the standalone YOLOv5 (mAP 0.145) and Faster R-CNN (mAP 0.142). Using a two-stage cascade of a YOLOv5 detector and an EfficientNet-based classifier with transfer learning, the accuracy of disease localization in chest X-rays is significantly improved. This approach improves the reliability of computer-aided diagnostic workflows by reducing false positives and does not require large-scale pretraining or complex transformer architectures.

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Index Terms

Computer Science
Information Sciences

Keywords

Thoracic Abnormality Localization Multi-Modal Deep Learning False Positive Pruning Chest X-Ray Analysis Transfer Learning