CheXwhatsApp: A Dataset for Exploring Challenges in the Diagnosis of Chest X-rays through Mobile Devices

Mobile health (mHealth) has emerged as a transformative solution to enhance healthcare accessibility and affordability, particularly in resource-constrained regions and low-to-middle-income countries.mHealth leverages mobile platforms to improve healthcare accessibility, addressing radiologist shortages in low-resource settings by enabling remote diagnosis and consultation through mobile devices. Mobile phones allow healthcare workers to transmit radiographic images, such as chest X-rays (CXR), to specialists or AI-driven models for interpretation. However, AI-based diagnosis using CXR images shared via apps like WhatsApp suffers from reduced predictability and explainability due to compression artifacts, and there is a lack of datasets to systematically study these challenges. To address this, we introduce CheXwhatsApp, a dataset of 175,029 paired original and WhatsApp-compressed CXR images. We present a benchmarking study which shows the dataset improves prediction stability and explainability of state-of-the-art models by up to 80%, while also enhancing localization performance. CheXwhatsApp is open-sourced to support advancements in mHealth applications for CXR analysis.