MEASURING GLOMERULAR NUMBER FROM KIDNEY MRI IMAGES

摘要

Measuring the number of glomeruli in the entire, intact kidney using non-destructive techniques is of immense importance in studying several renal and systemic diseases. In particular, a recent Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technique, based on injection of a contrast agent, cationic ferritin, has been effective in identifying glomerular regions in the kidney. In various embodiments, a low-complexity, high accuracy method for obtaining the glomerular count from such kidney MRI images is described. This method employs a patch-based approach for identifying a low-dimensional embedding that enables the separation of glomeruli regions from the rest. By using only a few images marked by the expert for learning the model, the method provides an accurate estimate of the glomerular number for any kidney image obtained with the contrast agent. In addition, the implementation of our method shows that this method is near real-time, and can process about 5 images per second.

主权项

1. A method of counting glomeruli in an image of a kidney, the method being implemented via execution of computer instructions configured to run at one or more processing modules and configured to be stored at one or more non-transitory memory storage modules, the method comprising:
analyzing patches corresponding to each pixel within the image; determining, using the patches, whether each pixel belongs to at least one of the glomeruli; and counting the glomeruli in the image.