Background: In kidney transplantation, a contrast CT scan is obtained in the candidate kidney donor to detect any subclinical pathology in the kidney. Recent work from the Aging Kidney Anatomy study has characterized kidney volumes, cortex volumes, and medulla volumes using a manual image processing tool. However, this technique is time consuming and impractical for clinical care, and thus, these measures are not obtained during donor evaluations. This study proposes a fully automated segmentation approach for measuring kidney, cortex, and medulla volumes.
Methods: A total of 1930 contrast-enhanced CT exams with reference standard manual segmentations from one institution were used for development of the algorithm. A convolutional neural network model was trained (n=1238) and validated (n=306), and then evaluated in a hold-out test set of reference standard segmentations (n=386). After the initial evaluation, the algorithm was further tested on datasets originating from two external sites (n=1226).
Results: The automated model was found to perform on par with manual segmentation with errors similar to interobserver variability with manual segmentations. Compared with the reference standard, the automated approach achieved a Dice similarity metric of 0.94 (right cortex), 0.90 (right medulla), 0.94 (left cortex), and 0.90 (left medulla) in the test set. Similar performance was observed when the algorithm was applied on the two external datasets.
Conclusions: A fully automated approach for measuring cortex and medullary volumes in CT images of the kidneys has been established. This method may prove useful for a wide range of clinical applications.
Automated Segmentation of Kidney Cortex and Medulla in CT Images: A Multisite Evaluation Study
