A new active shape models (ASMs) was presented, which is driven by scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) local descriptor instead of normalizing first order derivative profiles in the original formulation, to segment lung fields from chest radiographs. The modified SIFT local descriptor, more distinctive than the general intensity and gradient features, is used to characterize the image features in the vicinity of each pixel at each resolution level during the segmentation optimization procedure. Experimental results show that the proposed method is more robust and accurate than the original ASMs in terms of an average overlap percentage and average contour distance in segmenting the lung fields from an available public database.