Lung X-ray segmentation using deep convolutional neural networks on contrast-enhanced binarized images

Abstract

Automatically locating the lung regions effectively and efficiently in digital chest X-ray (CXR) images is important in computer-aided diagnosis. In this paper, we propose an adaptive pre-processing approach for segmenting the lung regions from CXR images using convolutional neural networks-based (CNN-based) architectures. It is comprised of three steps. First, a contrast enhancement method specifically designed for CXR images is adopted. Second, adaptive image binarization is applied to CXR images to separate the image foreground and background. Third, CNN-based architectures are trained on the binarized images for image segmentation. The experimental results show that the proposed pre-processing approach is applicable and effective to various CNN-based architectures and can achieve comparable segmentation accuracy to that of state-of-the-art methods while greatly expediting the model training by up to 20.74% and reducing storage space for CRX image datasets by down to 94.6% on average.