Lung Region Segmentation in Chest X-Ray Images using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Lung cancer is, by far, the leading cause of cancer death in the world. Tools for automated medical imaging analysis development of a Computer-Aided Diagnosis method comprises several tasks. In general, the first one is the segmentation of region of interest, for example, lung region segmentation from Chest X-ray imaging in the task of detecting lung cancer. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) have shown promising results in the task of segmentation in medical images. In this paper, to implement the lung region segmentation task on chest X-ray images, was evaluated three different DCNN architectures in association with different regularization (Dropout, L2, and Dropout + L2) and optimization methods (SGDM, RMSPROP and ADAM). All networks were applied in the Japanese Society of Radiological Technology (JSRT) database. The best results were obtained using Dropout + L2 as regularization method and ADAM as optimization method. Considering the Jaccard Coefficient obtained (0.97967 ± 0.00232) the proposal outperforms the state of the art.Clinical Relevance- The presented method reduces the time that a professional takes to perform lung segmentation, improving the effectiveness.