Exploiting the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for Lung Segmentation in Chest X-ray Images

Segment Anything Model (SAM), a new AI model from Meta AI released in April 2023, is an ambitious tool designed to identify and separate individual objects within a given image through semantic interpretation. The advanced capabilities of SAM are the result of its training with millions of images and masks, and a few days after its release, several researchers began testing the model on medical images to evaluate its performance in this domain. With this perspective in focus -- i.e., optimizing work in the healthcare field -- this work proposes the use of this new technology to evaluate and study chest X-ray images. The approach adopted for this work, with the aim of improving the model's performance for lung segmentation, involved a transfer learning process, specifically the fine-tuning technique. After applying this adjustment, a substantial improvement was observed in the evaluation metrics used to assess SAM's performance compared to the masks provided by the datasets. The results obtained by the model after the adjustments were satisfactory and similar to cutting-edge neural networks, such as U-Net.