Lung Segmentation from Chest X-Ray Images Using Deeplabv3plus-Based CNN Model

Abstract

As a result of technological advancements, a variety of medical diagnostic systems have grown rapidly to support the healthcare sectors. Over the past years, there has been considerable interest in utilizing deep learning algorithms for the proactive diagnosis of multiple diseases. In most cases, Coronavirus (COVID-19) and tuberculosis (TB) are diagnosed through the examination of pulmonary X-rays. Deep learning algorithms can identify tuberculosis with an almost medical-grade level of consistency by extracting the lung regions in the X-ray images. The probability of tuberculosis detection is increased when classification algorithms are applied to segmented lungs rather than the entire X-ray. The main focus of this paper is to execute lung segmentation from X-ray images using the deeplabv3plus CNN-based semantic segmentation model. In other CNN architectures, the feature resolution diminishes as the network becomes deeper due to the use of sequential convolutions with pooling or striding within the down-sampling stage. To tackle this drawback, deeplabv3plus incorporates "Atrous Convolution" in addition to modifying the pooling and convolutional striding components of the backbone. The experimental results were: an accuracy of 97.42%, a Jaccard index of 93.49%, and a dice coefficient of 96.63%. We also conduct an extensive comparison between the deeplabv3plus segmentation model and other benchmark segmentation architectures. The results prove the ability of the deeplabv3plus model to achieve precise lung segmentation from X-ray images.