A research team led by Po-Chih Kuo, PhD, an assistant professor of computer science from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, explained how the algorithm TBShoNet can be used on phones to help diagnose TB in areas where radiologists and high-resolution digital images are unavailable.

The neural network was pretrained on a database of 250,044 chest x-rays with 14 pulmonary labels that did not include TB. TBShoNet was then recalibrated for the use of chest x-ray photographs by using simulation methods. Model performance was tested using 662 chest x-ray photographs taken by five different phones (336 TB cases and 326 normal chest x-rays).

The researchers found TBShoNet produced 81% sensitivity and 84% specificity.