Lung field segmentation in chest X-rays: A deformation-tolerant procedure based on the approximation of rib cage seed points

Abstract

The delineation of bone structures is a crucial step in Chest X-ray image analysis. In the case of lung field segmentation, the main approach after the localization of bone structures is either their individual analysis or their suppression. We prove that a very fast and approximate identification of bone points that are most probably located inside the lung area can help in the segmentation of the lung fields, without the need for bone structure suppression. We introduce a deformation-tolerant region growing procedure. In a two-step approach, a sparse representation of the rib cage is guided to several support points on the lung border. We studied and dealt with the presence of other bone structures that interfere with the lung field. Our method demonstrated very robust behavior even with highly deformed lung appearances, and it achieved state-of-the-art performance in segmentations for the vast majority of evaluated CXR images. Our region growing approach based on the automatically detected rib cage points achieved an average Dice similarity score of 0.92 on the Montgomery County Chest X-ray dataset. We are confident that bone seed points can robustly mark a high-quality lung area while remaining unaffected by different lung shapes and abnormal structures.