GLAN: Global Local Attention Network for Thoracic Disease Classification to Enhance Heart Failure Diagnosis

ABSTRACT Chest x‐ray (CXR) is an effective method for diagnosing heart failure, and identifying important features such as cardiomegaly, effusion, and edema on patient chest x‐rays is significant for aiding the treatment of heart failure. However, manually identifying a vast amount of CXR data places a huge burden on physicians. Deep learning's progression has led to the utilization of this technology in numerous research aimed at tackling these particular challenges. However, many of these studies utilize global learning methods, where the contribution of each pixel to the classification is considered equal, or they overly focus on small areas of the lesion while neglecting the global context. In response to these issues, we propose the Global Local Attention Network (GLAN), which incorporates an improved attention module on a branched structure. This enables the network to capture small lesion areas while also considering both local and global features. We evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed model by testing it on multiple public datasets and real‐world datasets. Compared to the state‐of‐the‐art methods, our network structure demonstrated greater accuracy and effectiveness in the identification of three key features: cardiomegaly, effusion, and edema. This provides more targeted support for diagnosing and treating heart failure.