Automatic Analysis of Pediatric Renal Ultrasound Using Shape, Anatomical and Image Acquisition Priors

  • Carlos S. Mendoza
  • Xin Kang
  • Nabile Safdar
  • Emmarie Myers
  • Aaron D. Martin
  • Enrico Grisan
  • Craig A. Peters
  • Marius George Linguraru
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 8151)

Abstract

In this paper we present a segmentation method for ultrasound (US) images of the pediatric kidney, a difficult and barely studied problem. Our method segments the kidney on 2D sagittal US images and relies on minimal user intervention and a combination of improvements made to the Active Shape Model (ASM) framework. Our contributions include particle swarm initialization and profile training with rotation correction. We also introduce our methodology for segmentation of the kidney’s collecting system (CS), based on graph-cuts (GC) with intensity and positional priors. Our intensity model corrects for intensity bias by comparison with other biased versions of the most similar kidneys in the training set. We prove significant improvements (p < 0.001) with respect to classic ASM and GC for kidney and CS segmentation, respectively. We use our semi-automatic method to compute the hydronephrosis index (HI) with an average error of 2.67±5.22 percentage points similar to the error of manual HI between different operators of 2.31±4.54 percentage points.

Keywords

Particle Swarm Optimization Probability Density Function Training Image Kernel Density Estimation Active Shape Model 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  • Carlos S. Mendoza
    • 1
    • 2
  • Xin Kang
    • 1
  • Nabile Safdar
    • 1
  • Emmarie Myers
    • 1
  • Aaron D. Martin
    • 1
    • 3
  • Enrico Grisan
    • 4
  • Craig A. Peters
    • 1
    • 3
  • Marius George Linguraru
    • 1
  1. 1.Children’s National Medical CenterSheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical InnovationWashington DCUSA
  2. 2.Signal Processing DepartmentUniversity of SevillaSpain
  3. 3.Division of UrologyChildren’s National Medical CenterWashington DCUSA
  4. 4.Department of Information EngineeringUniversity of PadovaItaly

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