Journal of Soft Computing Exploration
Vol. 7 No. 1 (2026): March 2026

Tuberculosis classification on chest x-ray images using DenseNet-169 and convolutional block attention module

Muhammad Agil Izzulhaq (Department of Computer Science, Universitas Negeri Semarang, Indonesia)
Endang Sugiharti (Department of Computer Science, Universitas Negeri Semarang, Indonesia)



Article Info

Publish Date
19 Mar 2026

Abstract

Tuberculosis remains a major global health challenge, and the manual interpretation of chest X-rays is often limited by the subjectivity and shortage of radiology experts. While deep learning approaches like DenseNet have shown promise in medical imaging, the integration of attention mechanisms such as the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) for tuberculosis detection has been less explored. This study aimed to develop a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model utilizing DenseNet-169 combined with CBAM to accurately classify chest X-ray images into normal and tuberculosis classes. A dataset of 7,000 chest X-ray images was preprocessed and partitioned into training, validation, and testing sets. DenseNet-169 served as the backbone architecture, while CBAM was applied to emphasize crucial spatial and channel features. Evaluated across standard metrics, the proposed model achieved an accuracy of 99.43%, a precision of 99.72%, a recall of 99.14%, and an F1-score of 99.43%, successfully outperforming the baseline DenseNet-169 model without CBAM. Ultimately, the integration of CBAM with DenseNet-169 demonstrates remarkable potential in improving tuberculosis detection, confirming that attention mechanisms can substantially enhance deep learning performance in medical imaging.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

journal

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Control & Systems Engineering Decision Sciences, Operations Research & Management Electrical & Electronics Engineering

Description

The journal focuses on publishing high-quality, original research and review articles in the field of Soft Computing, Informatics and Computer Science, emphasizing the development, application, and rigorous evaluation of Advanced Computational Methods, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning ...