Abstract
Air collection around the lung regions can cause lungs to collapse. Conditions like emphysema can cause chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), wherein lungs get progressively damaged, and the damage cannot be reversed by treatment. It is recommended that these conditions be detected early via highly complex image processing models applied to chest X-rays so that the patient's life may be extended. Due to COPD, the bronchioles are narrowed and blocked with mucous, and causes destruction of alveolar geometry. These changes can be visually monitored via feature analysis using effective image classification models such as convolutional neural networks (CNN). CNNs have proven to possess more than 95% accuracy for detection of COPD conditions for static datasets. For consistent performance of CNNs, this paper presents an incremental learning mechanism that uses deep transfer learning for incrementally updating classification weights in the system. The proposed model is tested on 3 different lung X-ray datasets, and an accuracy of 99.95% is achieved for detection of COPD. In this paper, a model for temporal analysis of COPD detected imagery is proposed. This model uses Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) for evaluating lifespan of patients with COPD. Analysis of lifespan can assist doctors and other medical practitioners to take recommended steps for aggressive treatment. A smaller dataset was available to perform temporal analysis of COPD values because patients are not advised continuous chest X-rays due to their long-term side effects, which resulted in an accuracy of 97% for lifespan analysis.