Unsupervised segmentation of lungs from chest radiographs

Payel Ghosh; Sameer K. Antani; L. Rodney Long; George R. Thoma

doi:10.1117/12.911574

23 February 2012 Unsupervised segmentation of lungs from chest radiographs

Payel Ghosh, Sameer K. Antani, L. Rodney Long, George R. Thoma

Proceedings Volume 8315, Medical Imaging 2012: Computer-Aided Diagnosis; 831532 (2012) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.911574
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2012, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

This paper describes our preliminary investigations for deriving and characterizing coarse-level textural regions present in the lung field on chest radiographs using unsupervised grow-cut (UGC), a cellular automaton based unsupervised segmentation technique. The segmentation has been performed on a publicly available data set of chest radiographs. The algorithm is useful for this application because it automatically converges to a natural segmentation of the image from random seed points using low-level image features such as pixel intensity values and texture features. Our goal is to develop a portable screening system for early detection of lung diseases for use in remote areas in developing countries. This involves developing automated algorithms for screening x-rays as normal/abnormal with a high degree of sensitivity, and identifying lung disease patterns on chest x-rays. Automatically deriving and quantitatively characterizing abnormal regions present in the lung field is the first step toward this goal. Therefore, region-based features such as geometrical and pixel-value measurements were derived from the segmented lung fields. In the future, feature selection and classification will be performed to identify pathological conditions such as pulmonary tuberculosis on chest radiographs. Shape-based features will also be incorporated to account for occlusions of the lung field and by other anatomical structures such as the heart and diaphragm.

Citation Download Citation

Payel Ghosh, Sameer K. Antani, L. Rodney Long, and George R. Thoma "Unsupervised segmentation of lungs from chest radiographs", Proc. SPIE 8315, Medical Imaging 2012: Computer-Aided Diagnosis, 831532 (23 February 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.911574

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