# Chest X-ray lung and heart segmentation based on minimal training sets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.08309 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08309/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05074/) (2019)
- [A Novel Focal Tversky loss function with improved Attention U-Net for lesion segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07842/) (2018)
- [Bi-Directional ConvLSTM U-Net with Densley Connected Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00166/) (2019)
- [Attention U-Net Based Adversarial Architectures for Chest X-ray Lung Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10304/) (2020)
- [SCAN: Structure Correcting Adversarial Network for Organ Segmentation in Chest X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08770/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As the COVID-19 pandemic aggravated the excessive workload of doctors globally, the demand for computer aided methods in medical imaging analysis increased even further. Such tools can result in more robust diagnostic pipelines which are less prone to human errors. In our paper, we present a deep neural network to which we refer to as Attention BCDU-Net, and apply it to the task of lung and heart segmentation from chest X-ray (CXR) images, a basic but ardous step in the diagnostic pipeline, for instance for the detection of cardiomegaly. We show that the fine-tuned model exceeds previous state-of-the-art results, reaching 98.1± 0.1% Dice score and 95.2± 0.1% IoU score on the dataset of Japanese Society of Radiological Technology (JSRT). Besides that, we demonstrate the relative simplicity of the task by attaining surprisingly strong results with training sets of size 10 and 20: in terms of Dice score, 97.0± 0.8% and 97.3± 0.5, respectively, while in terms of IoU score, 92.2± 1.2% and 93.3± 0.4%, respectively. To achieve these scores, we capitalize on the mixup augmentation technique, which yields a remarkable gain above 4% IoU score in the size 10 setup.