Extraction of Whole-lung Field From Pseudo-chest X-ray Images Using U-net

This study aimed to develop a model using U-net to extract the whole lung field from pseudo-chest X-ray images, including areas overlapping with cardiac and diaphragm shadows. Training involved pseudo-X-rays and lung label images from CT scans of 140 cases from the LIDC-IDRI dataset. The extraction performance of the model was evaluated using the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC). We also examined the correlations among patient size, lung volume, and DSC. As a result, the whole-lung field extraction model developed in this study tended to over-extract intestinal gas in some cases, and the extraction performance varied depending on the patient size. However, the DSC between the whole-lung label image and the output image was >0.9 for all the test data, indicating that the whole-lung field can be extracted from the pseudo chest X-ray image.