CheXphoto: 10,000+ Smartphone Photos and Synthetic Photographic Transformations of Chest X-rays for Benchmarking Deep Learning Robustness

Abstract

Clinical deployment of deep learning algorithms for chest x-ray interpretation requires a solution that can integrate into the vast spectrum of clinical workflows across the world. An appealing solution to scaled deployment is to leverage the existing ubiquity of smartphones: in several parts of the world, clinicians and radiologists capture photos of chest x-rays to share with other experts or clinicians via smartphone using messaging services like WhatsApp. However, the application of chest x-ray algorithms to photos of chest x-rays requires reliable classification in the presence of smartphone photo artifacts such as screen glare and poor viewing angle not typically encountered on digital x-rays used to train machine learning models. We introduce CheXphoto, a dataset of smartphone photos and synthetic photographic transformations of chest x-rays sampled from the CheXpert dataset. To generate CheXphoto we (1) automatically and manually captured photos of digital x-rays under different settings, including various lighting conditions and locations, and, (2) generated synthetic transformations of digital x-rays targeted to make them look like photos of digital x-rays and x-ray films. We release this dataset as a resource for testing and improving the robustness of deep learning algorithms for automated chest x-ray interpretation on smartphone photos of chest x-rays.