SHIELD: A Self-Supervised, Silicosis-Focused Hierarchical Imaging Framework for Occupational Lung Disease Diagnosis

Abstract

Silicosis is an irreversible lung disease caused by silica dust exposure in industrial settings. Early detection is crucial, but automatic diagnostic methods are hindered by limited data availability. We propose SHIELD - a self-supervised, Silicosis-focused Hierarchical Imaging framework for early occupational Lung disease Diagnosis. Our method leverages a multi-resolution jigsaw puzzle pretext task on CXR images to extract and preserve features for lung region analysis. By employing a pyramidal strategy to generate pretrained models at various resolutions, followed by fine-tuning and a two-level ensembling across diverse deep learning architectures, SHIELD achieves enhanced diagnostic accuracy. We validate our approach on a publicly collected CXR dataset of 3044 samples from public health centers in India. SHIELD achieves 72% accuracy, demonstrating up to 20% improvement over baseline approaches. This work advances medical image analysis and supports UN Sustainable Development Goal 3 by providing cost-effective early screening in resource-limited settings.