Segmentation and classification on chest radiography: a systematic survey

Chest radiography (X-ray) is the most common diagnostic method for pulmonary disorders. A trained radiologist is required for interpreting the radiographs. But sometimes, even experienced radiologists can misinterpret the findings. This leads to the need for computer-aided detection diagnosis. For decades, researchers were automatically detecting pulmonary disorders using the traditional computer vision (CV) methods. Now the availability of large annotated datasets and computing hardware has made it possible for deep learning to dominate the area. It is now the modus operandi for feature extraction, segmentation, detection, and classification tasks in medical imaging analysis. This paper focuses on the research conducted using chest X-rays for the lung segmentation and detection/classification of pulmonary disorders on publicly available datasets. The studies performed using the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) models for segmentation and classification on chest X-rays are also included in this study. GAN has gained the interest of the CV community as it can help with medical data scarcity. In this study, we have also included the research conducted before the popularity of deep learning models to have a clear picture of the field. Many surveys have been published, but none of them is dedicated to chest X-rays. This study will help the readers to know about the existing techniques, approaches, and their significance.