Method and system of building hospital-scale chest x-ray database for entity extraction and weakly-supervised classification and localization of common thorax diseases

A system comprising:

• a computer processor;
• and
• a data storage device that stores a database comprising:
• a plurality of chest x-ray images;
• and
• disease labels and locations associated with each chest x-ray image;
• wherein the disease labels and locations are mined from radiological reports associated with the chest x-ray images, the disease labels identifying thoracic diseases indicated by the corresponding chest x-ray images, and the locations identifying anatomical areas in the chest x-ray images where the indicated thoracic diseases are located;
• wherein the computer processor is operable to receive or generate a chest x-ray image of a subject and to determine presence and anatomical locations of one or more thoracic diseases in the subject based on automated analysis of the chest x-ray image of the subject using a unified weakly supervised multi-label image classification and disease localization framework.