An image preprocessing method for kidney stone segmentation in CT scan images

Abstract

In 3D medical imaging, anatomical and other structures such as kidney stones are often identified and extracted with the aid of diagnosis and assessment of disease. Automatic kidney stone segmentation from abdominal CT images is challenging on the aspects of segmentation accuracy due to its variety of size, shape and location. The performance of 3D organ segmentation algorithm is also degraded by the image complexity containing multiple organs and because of their huge size. The current need is a preprocessing algorithm to assist the segmentation process. The objective of the present study was to develop reader independent preprocessing algorithm for kidney stone detection and segmentation in CT images. Three thresholding algorithms based on intensity, size and location are applied for unwanted regions removing such as soft-organ removing, bony skeleton removing and bed-mat removing. The digitized transverse abdomen CT scans images from 30 patients with kidney stone cases were included in statistical analysis and validation. As validation data for analysis, the estimation of coordinate points in stone region was measured independently by expert radiology. Experimental results prove that the proposed preprocessing algorithm has 95.24% sensitivity as the evaluation parameter. So, it can reduce the noise and unwanted regions in each procedure with good detection.