Ultrasonography Image Analysis for Detection and Classification of Chronic Kidney Diseases

Abstract:
More than 5% of adults suffer from different types of kidney disease and millions of people die prematurely from cardiovascular diseases associated with chronic kidney disease (CKD) in each year. The best way to reduce death caused by kidney disease is early prophylaxis and treatment, and which can be achieved through accurate and reliable diagnoses at the early stage. Among various diagnostic methods, ultrasonographic diagnosis is a low-cost, convenient, noninvasive, and timeliness method. Most importantly, this type of inspection would not cause extra burden on patients who suffer from kidney diseases. This project is based on analyzing ultrasonography images, and develops a system which can detect and classify different stages of CKD. The image processing techniques focus on detecting the atrophy of kidney and the proportion of fibrosis conditions within kidney tissues. The system consists of image inpainting, noise filtering, contour detection, local contrast enhancement, tissue clustering, and quantitative indicator measuring for distinguishing various stages of CKD.

Introduction:
More than 500 million persons worldwide suffer various forms of kidney damage and the incidence of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) is still increasing in different countries. To maintain the life of patient at ESRD period, dialysis or transplant is the ultimate way of therapy. Unfortunately, more than 40% of patients with kidney diseases do not know that they are already suffering kidney diseases according to the survey. It is mainly due to no significant symptom at early stages of chronic kidney disease (CKD), or sometimes the symptoms are easily misdiagnosed as colds or other diseases. Hence, after a period of time, the serious symptoms are suddenly exploded at its ending stages.

Proposed Method: Proposed method includes following steps. First image pre-processing is carried out. An Ultrasonic image might contain significant markers by medical doctors and/or system labelling. These markers may influence the results of boundary detection. Therefore the first step in pre-processing is removal of these markers and it is followed by speckle noise suppression. Both tasks in the pre-processing are designed for improving the accuracy of boundary detection between renal pelvis and parenchyma. Next step is region segmentation. In this, K-means clustering technique is proposed to segment region of interest (ROIs) in to several different local regions. After that texture detection of renal pelvis and renal parenchyma is carried out. Finally, measurement of transition indicator analysis will carried out. Due to the limitations of low quality of ultrasonic images, a completely automatic diagnosis system is not achievable. Hence, the first step of selecting regions of interest (ROI) is done by manual assistance, and which will successfully increase the rates of correct detection. In the second module, a K-means clustering technique is performed to detect the regions of renal pelvis and parenchyma. According to Ultrasonic images observation, the tissue pixels locate within renal pelvis have a tendency to be lighter gray levels and which are binarize into white pixels, while the tissue pixels located within renal parenchyma have a tendency to be darker gray levels and those pixels are binarized into black pixels. Therefore, one can evaluate the ratios of black and white pixels to indicate the proportions of distributed tissues of renal pelvis and parenchyma in each defined interval. According to the spatial distribution of white-toblack pixel ratio, various stages of CKD patients can be identified.

Software: MatLab 2010 List of IEEE papers: 1) Chih-Yin Ho, Tun-Wen Pai, Yuan-Chi Peng Ultrasonography Image Analysis for Detection and Classification of Chronic Kidney Disease Sixth International Conference on Complex, Intelligent, and Software Intensive Systems,2012 Flow Chart:

Ultrasonographic Images Acquisition

Image Pre-processing Image Inpainting Noise Filtering

Region Segmentation

Concentric Contour Detection Transition indicator Measurement

CKD Stage Identification

Expected result and analysis: Image Analysis for Detection and Classification of Chronic Kidney Disease Database: Talking to doctors and collecting ultrasound images from sonography centres in Satara. Expected date of completion: April 2014 Estimated cost: Tentative cost is around 25,000/-

References: 1) Chih-Yin Ho, Tun-Wen Pai, Yuan-Chi Peng Ultrasonography Image Analysis for Detection and Classification of Chronic Kidney Disease Sixth International Conference on Complex, Intelligent, and Software Intensive Systems,2012 2) Alexandru Telea, "An Image Inpainting Technique Based on the Fast Marching Method," Eindhoven University of Technology,Vol. 9, No. 1:2536. 3) S.K. Narayanan and R.S.D.Wahidabanu , "A View on Despeckling in Ultrasound Imaging, " International Journal of Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition ,vol. 2, no. 3, pp . 85-98 , Sep. 2009. 4) G. Gilboa, N. Sochen, and Y. Y. Zeevi, Texture preserving variational denoising using an adaptive fidelity term , IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 15, no. 8, pp. 2281-2289, 2006. 5) Amorim, R. C.; Mirkin, B (2012). "Minkowski metric, feature weighting and anomalous cluster initializing in K-Means clustering".Pattern Recognition 45 (3): 10611075.628