STERN: Attention-driven Spatial Transformer Network for abnormality detection in chest X-ray images

Joana Rocha, Sofia Cardoso Pereira, João Pedrosa, Aurélio Campilho, Ana Maria Mendonça

Abstract: Highlights•The proposed spatial transformer allows the system to focus on the thoracic region.•This built-in attention-driven model reduces the negative impact of image artifacts.•A novel loss function and a finetuning stage improve the initial methodology.•A set of proposed metrics evaluate and compare the thoracic region selection.•The end-to-end system outperforms typical object detection followed by classification.