LobePrior segments lung lobes on computed tomography images in the presence of severe abnormalities

The development of robust algorithms for lung and lobe segmentation is essential for diagnosing and monitoring pulmonary diseases. Obtaining manual or automatic annotations is challenging, especially in patients with severe abnormalities due to poorly visible lobar fissures. We present LobePrior, an automated lung lobe segmentation method combining deep neural networks and probabilistic models. Segmentation occurs in three stages: a coarse stage processing downsampled images, a high-resolution stage where specialized AttUNets segment each lobe, and a final post-processing stage. Probabilistic models derived from label fusion guide the network in regions with severe abnormalities, and synthetic lesion generation provides augmentation during training. Performance was evaluated on LOLA11 and three additional datasets with cancerous nodules or COVID-19 consolidations. LobePrior achieved accurate segmentations compared to manual ground truth, reaching state-of-the-art performance even in challenging cases. On the LOCCA dataset, it obtained a Dice score of 0.966, with similar improvements on a COVID-19 CT dataset (Dice 0.978). Statistically significant improvements over competing methods were observed across all datasets. These results demonstrate that LobePrior effectively integrates anatomical priors and deep learning to provide reliable lobe segmentation in the presence of severe pulmonary abnormalities.