Textural features for automatic detection and categorisation of pneumonia in chest X-ray images

Pneumonia is an acute lung infection caused by a variety of organisms, such as viruses, bacteria, or fungi, that poses a serious risk to vulnerable populations. The first step in the diagnosis and treatment of pneumonia is a prompt and accurate diagnosis, especially in the context of an epidemic outbreak such as COVID-19, where pneumonia is an important symptom. To provide tools for this purpose, this article evaluates the potential of three textural image characterisation methods, fractal dimension, radiomics, and superpixel-based histon, as biomarkers both to distinguish between healthy individuals and patients affected by pneumonia and to differentiate between potential pneumonia causes. The results show the ability of the textural characterisation methods tested to discriminate between nonpathological images and images with pneumonia, and how some of the generated models show the potential to characterise the general textural patterns that define viral and bacterial pneumonia, and the specific features associated with a COVID-19 infection.