Automated heart enlargement detection using chest x-ray image analysis

Heart disease is the number 1 killer in developed countries, and is also a leading cause of death in some developing countries. There are many kinds of heart diseases, and the common sign among these diseases is heart enlargement. Although heart diseases are the major causes of heart enlargement, other diseases can also cause it. Physicians try to distinguish heart enlargement via chest x-ray imaging. This paper presents an automated system for heart enlargement detection based on Digital Image Analysis. The system uses direct algorithm based on the method which physicians use for heart enlargement detection. The comparison performed over 38 chest x-ray images between the previous manual method and the new method suggested in this paper showed the new method is reliable and trust-able in both aspects of shape detection and size computation. Trough a confusion matrix, the accuracy of the system is also considered which is equivalent to 97.37%