Exploration on Framework for Chronic Kidney Disease Identification Based on 2D Ultrasound Images: A Survey

Background: Chronic Kidney Disease is one of the fatal diseases that ultimately result in kidney failure. The threat to mankind is the etiology of chronic kidney disease. Over the years researchers have proposed various techniques and methods to detect and diagnose chronic kidney disease. The traditional method of detecting chronic kidney disease is by determining the estimated glomerular filtration rate using creatinine from blood or urine. The traditional methods for detection and classification of chronic kidney disease is tedious and thus several researchers have suggested various alternatives. Recently, research community have shown keen interest in early detection of chronic kidney diseases based on imaging modalities such as ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography. Discussion: The strategy here is to have a systematic review of various existing techniques present in each stage of chronic kidney disease detection and classification using 2D ultrasound kidney images. The review is confined to only 2D ultrasound images considering the implementation even in under-developed countries as 2D ultrasound scans are cost effective compared to other modalities. The techniques and experimentation analysis of each work is thoroughly studied and discussed. Conclusion: This review brings out the state-of-the-art, challenges and possibilities for new research as well as improvement towards detecting and classifying chronic kidney diseases.

Segmentation of Renal Calculi in Ultrasound Kidney Images Using Modified Watershed Method

US images are a commonly used tool for renal calculi diagnosis, although they are time consuming and tedious for radiologists to manually detect and calculate the size of the renal calculi. It is very difficult to properly segment the US image to detect interested area of objects with the correct position and shape due to speckle formation and other artifacts. In addition, boundary edges may be missing or weak and usually incomplete at some places. With that point of view, the proposed method is developed for renal calculi segmentation. A new segmentation method is proposed in this chapter. Here, new region indicators and new modified watershed transformation are utilized. The proposed method is comprised of four major processes, namely preprocessing, determination of outer and inner region indictors, and modified watershed segmentation with ANFIS performance. The results show the effectiveness of proposed segmentation methods in segmenting the kidney stones and the achieved improvement in sensitivity and specificity measures.