Correlation of ultrasonographically determined renal cortical thickness and renal length with estimated glomerular filtration rate in chronic kidney disease patients

Data Augmentation Based on Generative Adversarial Networks to Improve Stage Classification of Chronic Kidney Disease

The prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) is estimated to be 13.4% worldwide and 15% in the United States. CKD has been recognized as a leading public health problem worldwide. Unfortunately, as many as 90% of CKD patients do not know that they already have CKD. Ultrasonography is usually the first and the most commonly used imaging diagnostic tool for patients at risk of CKD. To provide a consistent assessment of the stage classifications of CKD, this study proposes an auxiliary diagnosis system based on deep learning approaches for renal ultrasound images. The system uses the ACWGAN-GP model and MobileNetV2 pre-training model. The images generated by the ACWGAN-GP generation model and the original images are simultaneously input into the pre-training model MobileNetV2 for training. This classification system achieved an accuracy of 81.9% in the four stages of CKD classification. If the prediction results allowed a higher stage tolerance, the accuracy could be improved by up to 90.1%. The proposed deep learning method solves the problem of imbalance and insufficient data samples during training processes for an automatic classification system and also improves the prediction accuracy of CKD stage diagnosis.

Automation of the kidney function prediction and classification through ultrasound-based kidney imaging using deep learning

Prediction of kidney function and chronic kidney disease (CKD) through kidney ultrasound imaging has long been considered desirable in clinical practice because of its safety, convenience, and affordability. However, this highly desirable approach is beyond the capability of human vision. We developed a deep learning approach for automatically determining the estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) and CKD status. We exploited the transfer learning technique, integrating the powerful ResNet model pretrained on an ImageNet dataset in our neural network architecture, to predict kidney function based on 4,505 kidney ultrasound images labeled using eGFRs derived from serum creatinine concentrations. To further extract the information from ultrasound images, we leveraged kidney length annotations to remove the peripheral region of the kidneys and applied various data augmentation schemes to produce additional data with variations. Bootstrap aggregation was also applied to avoid overfitting and improve the model's generalization. Moreover, the kidney function features obtained by our deep neural network were used to identify the CKD status defined by an eGFR of <60 ml/min/1.73 m2. A Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.741 indicated the strong relationship between artificial intelligence (AI)- and creatinine-based GFR estimations. Overall CKD status classification accuracy of our model was 85.6% -higher than that of experienced nephrologists (60.3%-80.1%). Our model is the first fundamental step toward realizing the potential of transforming kidney ultrasound imaging into an effective, real-time, distant screening tool. AI-GFR estimation offers the possibility of noninvasive assessment of kidney function, a key goal of AI-powered functional automation in clinical practice.