Thoracic diseases, including pneumonia, tuberculosis, lung cancer, and others, pose significant health risks and require timely and accurate diagnosis to ensure proper treatment. Thus, in this research, a model for thorax disease classification using Chest X-rays is proposed by considering deep learning model. The input is pre-processed by resizing, normalizing pixel values, and applying data augmentation to address the issue of imbalanced datasets and improve model generalization. Significant features are extracted from the images using an Enhanced Auto-Encoder (EnAE) model, which combines a stacked auto-encoder architecture with an attention module to enhance feature representation and classification accuracy. To further improve feature selection, we utilize the Chaotic Whale Optimization (ChWO) Algorithm, which optimally selects the most relevant attributes from the extracted features. Finally, the disease classification is performed using the novel Improved Swin Transformer (IMSTrans) model, which is designed to efficiently process high-dimensional medical image data and achieve superior classification performance. The proposed EnAE + ChWO+IMSTrans model for thorax disease classification was evaluated using extensive Chest X-ray datasets and the Lung Disease Dataset. The proposed method demonstrates enhanced Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F-Score, MCC and MAE of 0.964, 0.977, 0.9845, 0.964, 0.9647, and 0.184 respectively indicating the reliable and efficient solution for thorax disease classification.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine has shown promise to improve the quality of healthcare decisions. However, AI can be biased in a manner that produces unfair predictions for certain demographic subgroups. In MIMIC-CXR, a publicly available dataset of over 300,000 chest X-ray images, diagnostic AI has been shown to have a higher false negative rate for racial minorities. We evaluated the capacity of synthetic data augmentation, oversampling, and demographic-based corrections to enhance the fairness of AI predictions. We show that adjusting unfair predictions for demographic attributes, such as race, is ineffective at improving fairness or predictive performance. However, using oversampling and synthetic data augmentation to modify disease prevalence reduced such disparities by 74.7% and 10.6%, respectively. Moreover, such fairness gains were accomplished without reduction in performance (95% CI AUC: [0.816, 0.820] versus [0.810, 0.819] versus [0.817, 0.821] for baseline, oversampling, and augmentation, respectively).