Dense-Unet: a light model for lung fields segmentation in Chest X-Ray images.

Automatic and accurate lung segmentation in chest X-ray (CXR) images is fundamental for computer-aided diagnosis systems since the lung is the region of interest in many diseases and also it can reveal useful information by its contours. While deep learning models have reached high performances in the segmentation of anatomical structures, the large number of training parameters is a concern since it increases memory usage and reduces the generalization of the model. To address this, a deep CNN model called Dense-Unet is proposed in which, by dense connectivity between various layers, information flow increases throughout the network. This lets us design a network with significantly fewer parameters while keeping the segmentation robust. To the best of our knowledge, Dense-Unet is the lightest deep model proposed for the segmentation of lung fields in CXR images. The model is evaluated on the JSRT and Montgomery datasets and experiments show that the performance of the proposed model is comparable with state-of-the-art methods.