An Approach for Kidney Stone Detection in Ultrasound Images

Abstract

In this paper we propose a model to detect the presence of renal calculi in a renal ultrasound image. Kidneys are one of the most important organs of the human body. These organs are shaped in the form of a bean and they perform the most pivotal task of cleaning out the waste materials from the blood, and other lethal elements from the body, in the form of urine. The kidneys are made up of a large number of units of filtering called nephrons. Each nephron has two parts, a glomerulus and a tubule. The nephrons perform the whole process in two steps; the glomerulus percolates the blood and the tubule the essential substances back to the blood and removes the harmful wastes. Most kidney diseases damage the nephrons and so the ability of the nephron to remove the wastes is rendered useless. One such Kidney disease is presence of stone in kidney. Kidney stones are small stone like structure made by collection of minerals and salts. There are many types of kidney stones present like calcium stones, struvite stones, uric acid stones, cystine stones. These stones can be detected by use of medical imaging. Medical imaging is a field where different technologies are used to create a visual representation of human body for diagnosing and treating the diseases. In this case we have used ultrasound imaging for our purpose. Here we will preprocess the images followed by segmentation to partition the image into the area containing the stone and then determine whether stone is present or not.