Normalization of Chest Radiographs

The clinical use of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems is increasing. A possible limitation of CAD systems is that they are typically trained on data from a small number of sources and as a result, they may not perform optimally on data from different sources. In particular for chest radiographs, it is known that acquisition settings, detector technology, proprietary post-processing and, in the case of analog images, digitization, can all influence the appearance and statistical properties of the image. In this work we investigate if a simple energy normalization procedure is sufficient to increase the robustness of CAD in chest radiography. We evaluate the performance of a supervised lung segmentation algorithm, trained with data from one type of machine, on twenty images each from five different sources. The results, expressed in terms of Jaccard index, increase from 0.530 A,A+- 0.290 to 0.914 A,A+- 0.041 when energy normalization is omitted or applied, respectively. We conclude that energy normalization is an effective way to make the performance of lung segmentation satisfactory on data from different sources.