Shape-based kidney detection and segmentation in three-dimensional abdominal ultrasound images

Due to recent technical advancements of three-dimensional ultrasound imaging systems, applications of this imaging modality have been expanding from the fetal imaging to cardiac- and abdominal-diagnosis. Among all internal organs, diagnosing the kidney has a paramount importance for rapid bedside treatment of trauma and kidney stone patients using ultrasound images. Although three-dimensional ultrasound provides higher level of structural information of kidneys, manual kidney diagnosis using three-dimensional ultrasound images requires a highly trained medical staff, due to the extensive visual complexity which three-dimensional images contain. Therefore, computer aided automated kidney diagnosis becomes very essential. Due to the challenging problems of ultrasound images, such as speckle noise and inhomogeneous intensity profile, kidney segmentation in three-dimensional ultrasound images has not been sufficiently investigated by researchers. In this paper, we first propose a new automated kidney detection approach using three-dimensional Morison's pouch ultrasound images. Then, we proposed a shape-based method to segment the detected kidneys. A preprocessing step is utilized to overcome the ultrasound challenges. Based on a set of 14 ultrasound volumes, we have evaluated the detection rate of our proposed kidney detection approach which is 92.86%. For kidney segmentation, we compared our proposed method with an existing approach, and the performed statistical analysis strongly validates the superiority of our proposed method with p = 0.000032.