Automated radiographic bone suppression with deep convolutional neural networks

Dual-energy subtraction (DES) is a technique that separates soft tissue from bones in a chest radiograph (CR). As DES requires specialized equipment, we propose an automatic method based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to generate virtual soft tissue images. A dataset comprising 35 pairs of CR and its soft-tissue version split in training (28 image pairs) and testing (7 image pairs) sets were used with data augmentation. We tested two types of images: the lung region’s cropped image and the segmented lung image. The ribs suppression was treated as a local problem, so each image was divided into 784 patches. The U-Net architecture was used to perform bone suppression. We tested two types of loss functions: mean squared error (Lmse) and Lsm, which combines Lmse with the structural similarity index measure (SSIM). Due to the patches overlapping, it was necessary to interpolate the gray levels on the reconstructed image from the predicted patches. Evaluations were based on SSIM and root mean square error (RMSE) over the reconstructed lung area. The combination that presented the best results used the loss Lsm and the segmented lung image as input to the U-Net (SSIM of 0.858 and RMSE of 0.033). We observed that the U-Net has poor performance when trained with cropped images containing all information from the chest cavity and how the loss using local information can improve CR rib bone suppression. Our results suggest that it is possible removing the rib bones accurately in CR using CNN and a patch-based approach.