Explainable Deep Learning for Lung Disease Detection from Chest X-rays via Layer-wise Relevance Propagation

Image Classification Chest X-Ray VGG16 Interpretability Layer-wise Relevance Propagation

Authors

  • Benny Sukma Negara Informatics Engineering Study Program, Faculty of Science and Technology, Universitas Islam Negeri Sultan Syarif Kasim, Pekanbaru-Riau, Indonesia.
  • Muhammad Irsyad Informatics Engineering Study Program, Faculty of Science and Technology, Universitas Islam Negeri Sultan Syarif Kasim, Pekanbaru-Riau, Indonesia.
  • Laila Nurul Fauziyyah Informatics Engineering Study Program, Faculty of Science and Technology, Universitas Islam Negeri Sultan Syarif Kasim, Pekanbaru-Riau, Indonesia.
February 9, 2026
February 12, 2026

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This study proposes an approach to classify lung diseases based on X-ray images using the VGG16 architecture equipped with the Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) interpretability method. The dataset consists of three classes: COVID-19, pneumonia, and normal, which are processed through augmentation and normalization. The model is trained with a data ratio of 70:30, a learning rate of 0.001, a batch size of 32, and an Adam optimizer. The training results show high accuracy of 96.78% with balanced precision, recall, and F1-score values. The LRP method was used to highlight important areas in the image that contributed to the model's prediction, thereby increasing decision transparency. The main contribution of this research is the integration of VGG16 with LRP in multi-class X-ray image classification, which provides accurate results along with visual interpretations that support confidence in medical applications.