Enhancing Pneumonia Segmentation in Lung Radiographs: A Jellyfish Search Optimizer Approach

Segmentation of pneumonia on lung radiographs is vital for the precise diagnosis and monitoring of the disease. It enables healthcare professionals to locate and quantify the extent of infection, guide treatment decisions, and improve patient care. One of the most-employed approaches to effectively segment pneumonia in lung radiographs is to treat it as an optimization task. By formulating the problem in this manner, it is possible to use the interesting capabilities of metaheuristic methods to determine the optimal segmentation solution. Although these methods produce interesting results, they frequently produce suboptimal solutions owing to the lack of exploration of the search space. In this paper, a new segmentation method for segmenting pneumonia in lung radiographs is introduced. The algorithm is based on the jellyfish search optimizer (JSO), which is characterized by its excellent global exploration capability and robustness. This method uses an energy curve based on cross-entropy as a cost function that penalizes misclassified pixels more heavily, leading to a sharper focus on regions where segmentation errors occur. This is particularly important because it allows for the accurate delineation of objects or regions of interest. To validate our proposed approach, we conducted extensive testing on the most widely available datasets. The results of our method were compared with those obtained using other established techniques. The results of our evaluation demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms the other methods at levels 8, 16, and 32, with a difference of more than 10%.