Tuberculosis (TB) is a chronic lung disease that occurs due to bacterial infection and is one of the top 10 leading causes of death. Accurate and early detection of TB is very important, otherwise, it could be life-threatening. In this work, we have detected TB reliably from the chest X-ray images using image pre-processing, data augmentation, image segmentation, and deep-learning classification techniques. Several public databases were used to create a database of 700 TB infected and 3500 normal chest X-ray images for this study. Nine different deep CNNs (ResNet18, ResNet50, ResNet101, ChexNet, InceptionV3, Vgg19, DenseNet201, SqueezeNet, and MobileNet), which were used for transfer learning from their pre-trained initial weights and trained, validated and tested for classifying TB and non-TB normal cases. Three different experiments were carried out in this work: segmentation of X-ray images using two different U-net models, classification using X-ray images, and segmented lung images. The accuracy, precision, sensitivity, F1-score, specificity in the detection of tuberculosis using X-ray images were 97.07 %, 97.34 %, 97.07 %, 97.14 % and 97.36 % respectively. However, segmented lungs for the classification outperformed than whole X-ray image-based classification and accuracy, precision, sensitivity, F1-score, specificity were 99.9 %, 99.91 %, 99.9 %, 99.9 %, and 99.52 % respectively. The paper also used a visualization technique to confirm that CNN learns dominantly from the segmented lung regions results in higher detection accuracy. The proposed method with state-of-the-art performance can be useful in the computer-aided faster diagnosis of tuberculosis.
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