Fibrous Tissue Semantic Segmentation in CT Images of Diffuse Interstitial Lung Disease.

Interstitial-lung-disease progression assessment and diagnosis via radiological findings on computed tomography images require significant time and effort from expert physicians. Accurate results from these analyses are critical for treatment decisions. Automatic semantic segmentation of radiologica...

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Published in:Journal of Imaging Informatics in Medicine Vol. 38; no. 6; pp. 3470 - 3484
Main Authors: Hernández-Vázquez, Natanael, Santos-Arce, Stewart R., Hernández-Gordillo, Daniel, Salido-Ruiz, Ricardo A., Torres-Ramos, Sulema, Román-Godínez, Israel
Format: diagnostic images equations & formulas research tables/charts Journal Article
Published: Springer Nature Dec2025
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Dec2025
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      pub: Springer Nature
      place: New York, New York
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        atl: Fibrous Tissue Semantic Segmentation in CT Images of Diffuse Interstitial Lung Disease.
      aug:
        au:
          Hernández-Vázquez, Natanael
          Santos-Arce, Stewart R.
          Hernández-Gordillo, Daniel
          Salido-Ruiz, Ricardo A.
          Torres-Ramos, Sulema
          Román-Godínez, Israel
        affil: https://ror.org/043xj7k26 División de Tecnologías para la Integración Ciber-Humana, CUCEI-Universidad de Guadalajara, Blvd. Marcelino García Barragán 1421, Olímpica, 44430, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico
      sug:
        subj:
          Lung Diseases, Interstitial Diagnosis
          Tomography, X-Ray Computed Utilization
          Image Processing, Computer Assisted Utilization
          Fibrosis Diagnosis
          Funding Source
          Research Methodology
          Academic Medical Centers
          Switzerland
          Descriptive Statistics
          Comparative Studies
          T-Tests
          Mann-Whitney U Test
      ab: Interstitial-lung-disease progression assessment and diagnosis via radiological findings on computed tomography images require significant time and effort from expert physicians. Accurate results from these analyses are critical for treatment decisions. Automatic semantic segmentation of radiological findings has been developed recently using convolutional neural networks (CNN). However, on the one hand, few works present individual performance scores for radiological findings that allow for accurately measuring fibrosis segmentation performances; on the other hand, the poorly annotated quality of available databases may mislead researcher observations. This study presents a CNN methodology employing three different architectures (U-net, LinkNet, and FPN) with transfer learning and data augmentation to enhance the performance in semantic segmentation of fibrosis-related radiological findings (FRF). In addition, considering the poor quality of manual CT tagging on available datasets, we use two alternative evaluation strategies, first using only the fibrosis region of interest. Second, re-tagging and validating the test set by an expert pulmonologist. Using DICOM images from the Interstitial Lung Diseases Database, the implemented approach achieves a Jaccard Score Index of 0.7355 with a standard deviation of 0.0699 and a Dice Similarity Coefficient of 0.8459 with a standard deviation of 0.0470 comparable to state-of-the-art performance in FRF semantic segmentation. Also, a visual evaluation of the images automatically tagged by our proposal was performed by a pulmonologist. Our proposed method successfully identifies these FRF areas, demonstrating its effectiveness. Also, the pulmonologist revealed discrepancies in the dataset tags, indicating deficiencies in FRF annotations.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype:
        diagnostic images
        equations & formulas
        research
        tables/charts
        Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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