Attention U-Net Based Adversarial Architectures for Chest X-ray Lung Segmentation
This work addresses a basic but arduous task in medical imaging to reduce radiologists' workload and improve diagnostic reliability, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The paper tackled lung segmentation in chest X-rays using a deep learning approach combining fully convolutional neural networks with an adversarial critic model, achieving a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 97.5% on the JSRT dataset.
Chest X-ray is the most common test among medical imaging modalities. It is applied for detection and differentiation of, among others, lung cancer, tuberculosis, and pneumonia, the last with importance due to the COVID-19 disease. Integrating computer-aided detection methods into the radiologist diagnostic pipeline, greatly reduces the doctors' workload, increasing reliability and quantitative analysis. Here we present a novel deep learning approach for lung segmentation, a basic, but arduous task in the diagnostic pipeline. Our method uses state-of-the-art fully convolutional neural networks in conjunction with an adversarial critic model. It generalized well to CXR images of unseen datasets with different patient profiles, achieving a final DSC of 97.5% on the JSRT dataset.