Generative AI: A Pix2pix-GAN-Based Machine Learning Approach for Robust and Efficient Lung Segmentation

Chest radiography is climacteric in identifying different pulmonary diseases, yet radiologist workload and inefficiency can lead to misdiagnoses. Automatic, accurate, and efficient lung segmentation from chest X-ray (CXR) images is paramount for early disease detection. This study develops a deep learning framework using a Pix2pix Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to segment pulmonary abnormalities from CXR images. This framework’s image preprocessing and augmentation techniques were properly incorporated with a U-Net-inspired generator-discriminator architecture. Initially, it loaded the CXR images and manual masks from the Montgomery and Shenzhen datasets, after which preprocessing and resizing were performed. A U-Net generator is applied to the processed CXR images that yield segmented masks; then, a Discriminator Network differentiates between the generated and real masks. The model was trained on the Montgomery dataset in the study, and the Shenzhen dataset was used to test its robustness, which was used here for the first time. An adversarial loss and an L1 distance were used to optimize the model in training. All metrics, which assess precision, recall, F1 score, and Dice coefficient, prove the effectiveness of this framework in pulmonary abnormality segmentation. It, therefore, sets the basis for future studies to be performed shortly using diverse datasets that could further confirm its clinical applicability in medical imaging.