Automated Cardiothoracic Ratio Calculation and Cardiomegaly Detection using Deep Learning Approach

Abstract: We propose an algorithm for calculating the cardiothoracic ratio (CTR) from chest X-ray films. Our approach applies a deep learning model based on U-Net with VGG16 encoder to extract lung and heart masks from chest X-ray images and calculate CTR from the extents of obtained masks. Human radiologists evaluated our CTR measurements, and $76.5\%$ were accepted to be included in medical reports without any need for adjustment. This result translates to a large amount of time and labor saved for radiologists using our automated tools.