Left and right lung-specific method of segmentation in chest radiographs

Lung segmentation supports essential functionality within the realm of computer-aided detection and diagnosis using chest radiographs. In this research, we present a novel bifurcation approach of segmenting the lungs by separating them down the spinal column and having separate networks for the right and the left lungs respectively. Results from the right lung and left lung networks are then merged to form the overall lung. We utilize DeepLabV3+ network with ResNet50 as the backbone for both left and right lung networks. Results are presented for publicly available datasets such as Shenzhen Dataset and Japanese Society of Radiological Technology (JSRT) dataset. Our proposed bifurcation approach achieved an overall accuracy of 98.8% and an IoU (Intersection over Union) of 0.977 for a set of 100 cases in Shenzhen dataset. We conducted an additional robustness study of this method by training and testing on an independent dataset utilizing a hold-out methodology. We utilize a private dataset for the training and testing occurs on an independent JSRT dataset comprising 140 cases and our algorithm achieved an overall IoU of 0.945 thereby demonstrating its efficacy against other whole lung models and setting a new benchmark for future research works.