Deep Transfer Learning for Segmentation of Anatomical Structures in Chest Radiographs

Segmentation of anatomical structures in Chest Posterior-Anterior Radiographs is a classical task on biomedical image analysis. Deep Learning has been widely used for detection and diagnosis of illnesses in several medical image modalities over the last years, but the portability of deep methods is still limited, hampering the reusability of pre-trained models in new data. We address this problem by proposing a novel method for Cross-Dataset Transfer Learning in Chest X-Ray images based on Unsupervised Image Translation architectures. Our Transfer Learning approach achieved Jaccard values of 88.20% on lung field segmentation in the Montgomery Set by using a pre-trained model on the JSRT dataset and no labeled data from the target dataset. Several experiments in unsupervised and semi-supervised transfer were performed and our method consistently outperformed simple fine-tuning when a limited amount of labels is used. Qualitative analysis on the tasks of clavicle and heart segmentation are also performed on Montgomery samples and pre-trained models from JSRT dataset. Our secondary contributions encompass several experiments in anatomical structure segmentation on JSRT, achieving state-of-the-art results in lung field (96.02%), heart (89.64%) and clavicle segmentation (87.30%).