Accurate kidney surface reconstruction from 3D ultrasonography for volume assessment: First clinical evaluation

An accurate, repeatable and noninvasive measurement of kidney volume is an important but difficult task for nephrologists. This paper proposes a new kidney volumetry method by reconstructing the kidney surface from three-dimensional ultrasonography (3DUS) using statistical shape model (SSM). The measurement starts with picking sparse points on the kidney contour from 3DUS images. Then an accurate 3D kidney surface mesh can be reconstructed from the input points using the SSM in a fine-tune way. The kidney volume is finally calculated from the surface using divergence theorem of Gauss. The accuracy and repeatability of the proposed method have been validated on 36 patients. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is a promising solution for clinical evaluation of the kidney volume.