Chronic kidney disease (CKD) can be treated if it is detected early, but as the disease progresses, recovery becomes impossible. Eventually, renal replacement therapy such as transplantation or dialysis is necessary. Ultrasound is a test method with which to diagnose kidney cancer, inflammatory disease, nodular disease, chronic kidney disease, etc. It is used to determine the degree of inflammation using information such as the kidney size and internal echo characteristics. The degree of the progression of chronic kidney disease in the current clinical trial is based on the value of the glomerular filtration rate. However, changes in the degree of inflammation and disease can even be observed with ultrasound. In this study, from a total of 741 images, 251 normal kidney images, 328 mild and moderate CKD images, and 162 severe CKD images were tested. In order to diagnose CKD in clinical practice, three ROIs were set: the cortex of the kidney, the boundary between the cortex and medulla, and the medulla, which are areas examined to obtain information from ultrasound images. Parameters were extracted from each ROI using the GLCM algorithm, which is widely used in ultrasound image analysis. When each parameter was extracted from the three areas, a total of 57 GLCM parameters were extracted. Finally, a total of 58 parameters were used by adding information on the size of the kidney, which is important for the diagnosis of chronic kidney disease. The artificial neural network (ANN) was composed of 58 input parameters, 10 hidden layers, and 3 output layers (normal, mild and moderate CKD, and severe CKD). Using the ANN model, the final classification rate was 95.4%, the epoch needed for training was 38 times, and the misclassification rate was 4.6%.
Keywords: artificial neural network; chronic kidney disease (CKD); classification; gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM); kidney ultrasound.