Automatic Definition of Regions of Interest on Renal Scintigraphic Images

Abstract

Renography is a radionuclide technique introduced in medicine since the early sixties in the daily practice. It allows measuring the function of each kidney separately in case of unilateral or bilateral uro-nephrological disease. A new system for analysis of Renography is presented in this paper. Our system aims to show a fully automated method for drawing the renal regions of interest based on a multi-agent system that incorporates spatio-temporal interest points detection on scintigraphic images by using the HOG3D descriptor to initialize agents. We used both types of agents, namely supervisor agents and explorator agents, they communicate among themselves and they inspire in their behavior from the Fast Marching method. Our system was tested on many real patients’ cases and we have obtained encouraging results. Clinical validation showed a constant agreement between the approach presented and manual segmentation by professionals in the nuclear medicine.