Lung segmentation in chest radiographs using anatomical atlases with nonrigid registration.

Candemir S, Jaeger S, Palaniappan K, Musco J, Singh RK, Xue Z, Karargyris A, Antani SK, Thoma GR, McDonald CJ

IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2014 Feb;33(2):577-90. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2013.2290491. Epub 2013 Nov 13.

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Abstract:

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is developing a digital chest X-ray (CXR) screening system for deployment in resource constrained communities and developing countries worldwide with a focus on early detection of tuberculosis. A critical component in the computer-aided diagnosis of digital CXRs is the automatic detection of the lung regions. In this paper, we present a nonrigid registration-driven robust lung segmentation method using image retrieval-based patient specific adaptive lung models that detects lung boundaries, surpassing state-of-the-art performance. The method consists of three main stages: 1) a content-based image retrieval approach for identifying training images (with masks) most similar to the patient CXR using a partial Radon transform and Bhattacharyya shape similarity measure, 2) creating the initial patient-specific anatomical model of lung shape using SIFT-flow for deformable registration of training masks to the patient CXR, and 3) extracting refined lung boundaries using a graph cuts optimization approach with a customized energy function. Our average accuracy of 95.4% on the public JSRT database is the highest among published results. A similar degree of accuracy of 94.1% and 91.7% on two new CXR datasets from Montgomery County, MD, USA, and India, respectively, demonstrates the robustness of our lung segmentation approach.

Candemir S, Jaeger S, Palaniappan K, Musco J, Singh RK, Xue Z, Karargyris A, Antani SK, Thoma GR, McDonald CJ. Lung segmentation in chest radiographs using anatomical atlases with nonrigid registration. 
IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2014 Feb;33(2):577-90. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2013.2290491. Epub 2013 Nov 13.

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