Computer aided renal calculi detection using Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: In this thesis a novel approach is developed to detect urethral stones based on a computer-aided process. The input data is a CT scan from the patient, which is a high-resolution 3D grayscale image. The algorithm developed extracts the regions that might be stones, based on the intensity values of the pixels in the CT scan. This process includes a binarizing process of the image, finding the connected components of the resulting binary image and calculating the centroid of each of the components selected. The regions that are suspected to be stones are used as input of a CNN, a modified version of an ANN, so they can be classified as stone or non-stone. The parameters of the CNN have been chosen based on an exhaustive hyperparameter search with different configurations to select the one that gives the best performance. The results have been satisfactory, obtaining an accuracy of 98,3%, a sensitivity of 99,5% and a F1 score of 98,3%.