Chest X-ray (CXR) is one of the most commonly prescribed medical imaging procedures, often with over 2-10x more scans than other imaging modalities such as MRI, CT scan, and PET scans. These voluminous CXR scans place significant workloads on radiologists and medical practitioners. Organ segmentation is a crucial step to obtain effective computer-aided detection on CXR. In this work, we propose Structure Correcting Adversarial Network (SCAN) to segment lung fields and the heart in CXR images. SCAN incorporates a critic network to impose on the convolutional segmentation network the structural regularities emerging from human physiology. During training, the critic network learns to discriminate between the ground truth organ annotations from the masks synthesized by the segmentation network. Through this adversarial process the critic network learns the higher order structures and guides the segmentation model to achieve realistic segmentation outcomes. Extensive experiments show that our method produces highly accurate and natural segmentation. Using only very limited training data available, our model reaches human-level performance without relying on any existing trained model or dataset. Our method also generalizes well to CXR images from a different patient population and disease profiles, surpassing the current state-of-the-art.
X-rays are commonly performed imaging tests that use small amounts of radiation to produce pictures of the organs, tissues, and bones of the body. X-rays of the chest are used to detect abnormalities or diseases of the airways, blood vessels, bones, heart, and lungs. In this work we present a stochastic attention-based model that is capable of learning what regions within a chest X-ray scan should be visually explored in order to conclude that the scan contains a specific radiological abnormality. The proposed model is a recurrent neural network (RNN) that learns to sequentially sample the entire X-ray and focus only on informative areas that are likely to contain the relevant information. We report on experiments carried out with more than @math X-rays containing enlarged hearts or medical devices. The model has been trained using reinforcement learning methods to learn task-specific policies. Despite the recent advances in automatically describing image contents, their applications have been mostly limited to image caption datasets containing natural images (e.g., Flickr 30k, MSCOCO). In this paper, we present a deep learning model to efficiently detect a disease from an image and annotate its contexts (e.g., location, severity and the affected organs). We employ a publicly available radiology dataset of chest x-rays and their reports, and use its image annotations to mine disease names to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In doing so, we adopt various regularization techniques to circumvent the large normal-vs-diseased cases bias. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are then trained to describe the contexts of a detected disease, based on the deep CNN features. Moreover, we introduce a novel approach to use the weights of the already trained pair of CNN RNN on the domain-specific image text dataset, to infer the joint image text contexts for composite image labeling. Significantly improved image annotation results are demonstrated using the recurrent neural cascade model by taking the joint image text contexts into account.