Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) benefits from its early diagnosis and accurate treatment of lung diseases. Accurate segmentation of lung fields is an important component in CAD for lung health, which facilitates subsequent analysis. However, most of the existing algorithms for lung fields segmentation are unable to ensure appearance and spatial consistency due to the varied boundaries and poor contrasts. In this paper, we propose a novel and hybrid method for lung fields segmentation by integrating Dense-U-Net network and a fully connected conditional random field (CRF). In order to realize the reuse of image features, the structure of densely-connected is added to the decoder, which ensures the object with varied shapes and sizes can be extracted without adding more parameters. To make full use of the mutual information among pixels of the original image, a fully connected CRF algorithm is adopted to further optimize the preliminary segmentation results according to the intensity and position of each pixel. Compared with some previous popular methods on JSRT dataset, the proposed method in this paper shows higher Jaccard index and Dice-Coefficient.
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