Abstract
Early detection of the Autosomal Dominant
Polycystic Kidney Disease (ADPKD) is crucial as it is one
of the most common causes of end-stage renal disease
(ESRD) that leads to kidney failure. Therefore, it is important to assess the disease progression to plan for proper
therapeutic intervention. The total kidney volume (TKV)
has been shown to increase with ADPKD progression and
therefore can be used to quantify disease progression.
However, TKV calculation requires accurate delineation of
the kidney volumes, usually performed manually by an
expert physician. Time-consuming manual contouring is
a limitation for deploying deep learning medical image
processing. Therefore, large annotated datasets are rare.
In this work, we address this problem by implementing
three attention mechanisms into the U-Net. In addition,
we also implement a cosine loss function, that has been
shown to work well on small datasets. Our results show
significant improvement (p-value < 0.05) over the reference
kidney segmentation U-Net. We show that the attention
mechanisms and/or the cosine loss can help improve the
dice score up to 91% (approx. 2-3% improvement) with
a mean symmetric surface distance of 1.36 mm (11.2 %
improvement) while utilizing in total only 100 datasets for
training and testing.