Estimating Total Lung Volume from Pixel-level Thickness Maps of Chest Radiographs Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Purpose: To estimate the total lung volume (TLV) from real and synthetic frontal chest radiographs (CXR) on a pixel level using lung thickness maps generated by a U-Net deep learning model. Methods: This retrospective study included 5,959 chest CT scans from two public datasets: the lung nodule analysis 2016 (n=656) and the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) pulmonary embolism detection challenge 2020 (n=5,303). Additionally, 72 participants were selected from the Klinikum Rechts der Isar dataset (October 2018 to December 2019), each with a corresponding chest radiograph taken within seven days. Synthetic radiographs and lung thickness maps were generated using forward projection of CT scans and their lung segmentations. A U-Net model was trained on synthetic radiographs to predict lung thickness maps and estimate TLV. Model performance was assessed using mean squared error (MSE), Pearson correlation coefficient (r), and two-sided Student's t-distribution. Results: The study included 72 participants (45 male, 27 female, 33 healthy: mean age 62 years [range 34-80]; 39 with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: mean age 69 years [range 47-91]). TLV predictions showed low error rates ($MSE_{Public-Synthetic}$=0.16 $L^2$, $MSE_{KRI-Synthetic}$=0.20 $L^2$, $MSE_{KRI-Real}$=0.35 $L^2$) and strong correlations with CT-derived reference standard TLV ($n_{Public-Synthetic}$=1,191, r=0.99, P<0.001; $n_{KRI-Synthetic}$=72, r=0.97, P<0.001; $n_{KRI-Real}$=72, r=0.91, P<0.001). The Luna16 test data demonstrated the highest performance, with the lowest mean squared error (MSE = 0.09 $L^2$) and strongest correlation (r = 0.99, P <0.001) for TLV estimation. Conclusion: The U-Net-generated pixel-level lung thickness maps successfully estimated TLV for both synthetic and real radiographs.