Rib segmentation algorithm for X-ray image based on unpaired sample augmentation and multi-scale network

Rib segmentation based on chest X-ray images is essential in the computer-aided diagnosis systems of lung cancer, which serves as an important step in the quantitative analysis of various types of lung diseases. However, the traditional methods are unable to segment ribs effectively due to the unclear edges and overlapping regions in X-ray images. A novel rib segmentation framework based on Unpaired Sample Augmentation and Multi-Scale Network is presented in this paper, aiming to improve the accuracy of ribs segmentation with limited labeled samples. First, the algorithm learns pneumonia-related texture changes via unpaired chest x-ray images and generates various augmented samples. Then, a multi-scale network attempts to learn hierarchical features using global supervision. Finally, the refined segmentation result of each organ is achieved by using a deep separation module and a comprehensive loss function. Specifically, the hierarchical features can greatly improve the robustness of multi-organ segmentation networks. The complex multi-organ segmentation task with limited labeled data is simplified with the designed deep separation module. We justify the proposed framework through extensive experiments. It achieves good performance with DSC, Precision, Recall, and Jaccard of 88.03, 88.25, 88.36, and 79.02%, respectively. The DSC value increases nearly by 3% compared to other popular methods. The experimental results show that our algorithm presents better segmentation performance for the overlapping region and fuzzy region of multiple organs, which holds research value and prospects for application.