Computer-aided Detection of Lung Tumors in Chest X-ray Images Using a Bone Suppression Algorithm and A Deep Learning Framework

Abstract

Detecting lung tumors in early stage by reading chest X-ray images is important for radical treatments of the disease. In order to decrease the risk of missed lung tumors, diagnosis support systems that can provide the accurate detection of lung tumors are in high demand, and the use of artificial intelligence with deep learning is one of the promising solutions. In our research, we aim to improve the accuracy of a deep learning-based system for detecting lung tumors by developing a bone suppression algorithm as a preprocessing for the machine-learning model. Our bone suppression algorithm was devised for conventional single-shot chest X-ray images, which do not rely on a specific type of imaging systems. 604 chest X-ray images were processed using the proposed algorithm and evaluated by combining it with a U-net deep learning model. The results showed that the bone suppression algorithm successfully improved the performance of the deep learning model to identify the location of lung tumors (Intersection over Union) from 0.085 (without the bone suppression algorithm) to 0.142, as well as the ability to classify the lung cancer (Area under Curve) that increased from 0.700 to 0.736. The bone suppression algorithm would be useful to improve the accuracy and the reliability of the deep learning-based diagnosis support systems for detecting lung cancer in mass medical examinations.