Lung Segmentation in Chest X-rays with Res-CR-Net
This is an incremental improvement for medical imaging researchers, applying an existing method to a new domain (chest X-rays).
The authors tackled lung segmentation in chest X-rays by applying Res-CR-Net, a non-U-Net fully convolutional network originally for microscopy images, and found it effective for both healthy and pathological cases.
Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are widely used to carry out segmentation tasks in biomedical images. Most DNNs developed for this purpose are based on some variation of the encoder-decoder U-Net architecture. Here we show that Res-CR-Net, a new type of fully convolutional neural network, which was originally developed for the semantic segmentation of microscopy images, and which does not adopt a U-Net architecture, is very effective at segmenting the lung fields in chest X-rays from either healthy patients or patients with a variety of lung pathologies.