Methods, systems and apparatus for processing medical chest images

Abstract

Described herein are systems, methods, and instrumentalities associated with processing medical chest images such as chest X-ray (CXR) images. Segmentation models derived via a deep learning process are used to segment the chest images and obtain a rib segmentation result and a lung segmentation result for each image. The rib segmentation result may include a rib sequence identified in the image while the lung segmentation result may include one or more lung fields identified in the image. The quality of each chest image (e.g., whether the image reflects a breath-holding state of the patient) may then be determined based on whether a sufficient number of ribs in the rib segmentation result overlap with the lung fields in the lung segmentation result. The segmentation results may be obtained in a coarse-to-fine manner, e.g., by first determining a large rib area and then further segmenting the large rib area to identify each individual rib.