A Novel Approach to Chest X-ray Lung Segmentation Using U-net and Modified Convolutional Block Attention Module

Lung segmentation in chest X-ray (CXR) images is a crucial task in medical image analysis, aiding in accurate disease diagnosis and treatment planning. This study presents an improved U-Net architecture by integrating a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to enhance segmentation performance. The proposed CBAM unifies three attention mechanisms (Channel Attention, Spatial Attention, and Pixel Attention) to refine feature extraction and improve focus on critical image regions. The Channel Attention mechanism emphasizes inter-channel dependencies, the Spatial Attention mechanism enhances localization accuracy by highlighting spatial correlations, and the Pixel Attention mechanism refines segmentation precision at the pixel level. By incorporating CBAM into the U-Net framework, the model achieves superior performance in lung segmentation, as evaluated using the Dice coefficient and Jaccard similarity index. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves segmentation accuracy, making it a promising advancement in medical image processing for lung disease assessment.