Objective: Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is evaluated based on glomerular filtration rate (GFR) using a gamma camera in the nuclear medicine center or hospital in a routine procedure, but the gamma camera does not provide the accurate stages of the diseases. Therefore, this research aimed to find out the normal or abnormal stages of CKD based on the value of GFR using an artificial neural network (ANN).
Methods: Two hundred fifty (Training 188, Testing 62) kidney patients who underwent the ultrasonography test to diagnose the renal test in our nuclear medical centre were scanned using gamma camera. The patients were injected with 99mTc-DTPA before the scanning procedure. After pushing the syringe into the patient's vein, the pre-syringe and post syringe radioactive counts were calculated using the gamma camera. The artificial neural network uses the softmax function with cross-entropy loss to diagnose CKD normal or abnormal labels depending on the value of GFR in the output layer.
Results: The results showed that the accuracy of the proposed ANN model was 99.20% for K-fold cross-validation. The sensitivity and specificity were 99.10% and 99.20%, respectively. The Area under the curve (AUC) was 0.9994.
Conclusion: The proposed model using an artificial neural network can classify the normal or abnormal stages of CKD. After implementing the proposed model clinically, it may upgrade the gamma camera to diagnose the normal or abnormal stages of the CKD with an appropriate GFR value.
Keywords: Artificial neural network; Gamma camera; Glomerular filtration rate; Stages of chronic kidney disease.
© 2021. The Japanese Society of Nuclear Medicine.