KidMesh: Computational Mesh Reconstruction for Pediatric Congenital Hydronephrosis Using Deep Neural Networks.

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Computational Biology
• Pediatric Urology

Background:

• Pediatric congenital hydronephrosis (CH) is a common urinary tract obstruction.
• Magnetic resonance urography (MRU) visualizes CH, but current segmentation methods focus on morphology, requiring complex post-processing for functional analysis.
• Existing methods necessitate extensive post-processing to convert segmented CH regions into mesh representations for urodynamic simulations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an end-to-end deep learning method, KidMesh, for direct reconstruction of CH meshes from MRU images.
• To enable functional assessments, such as urodynamic simulations, by generating accurate mesh-level representations.
• To overcome the limitations of current segmentation techniques that require complex post-processing.

Main Methods:

• KidMesh utilizes deep neural networks to extract feature maps from MRU images.
• Feature maps are converted into feature vertices via grid sampling, which then deform a template mesh to generate patient-specific CH meshes.
• A novel training schema was developed to train KidMesh without requiring precise mesh-level annotations, addressing challenges posed by sparsely sampled MRU data.

Main Results:

• KidMesh reconstructs CH meshes rapidly, averaging 0.4 seconds per case.
• The method achieves comparable performance to conventional approaches without post-processing.
• Reconstructed meshes demonstrate high accuracy, with a Dice score of 0.86 against manual segmentations and minimal vertex error distances (3.7% > 3.2mm, 0.2% > 6.4mm).

Conclusions:

• KidMesh offers an efficient and automated solution for reconstructing CH meshes directly from MRU.
• The generated meshes facilitate urodynamic simulations, providing valuable functional insights for clinical practice.
• This approach enhances the diagnostic and prognostic capabilities for pediatric congenital hydronephrosis.