Analysis of MRI data of patients with ADPKD for the volume of the kidneys and of the enclosed cysts

Autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) is characterized by the growth of cysts in the kidneys that increase their volume, disrupt renal function, and lead to kidney failure. So far no efficacious therapy for this condition exists and thus clinical treatment trials are performed. In this work patients participating in such a study were monitored with MRI. The manual data analysis is costly and potentially biased. This work presents a reliable method for the identification of the polycystic kidneys as well as of the enclosed cysts that enables extensive quantification and improves objectivity. The images are first restored for imaging artifacts. The foreground and the region of interest surrounding each kidney is then identified and used to compute its statistical and geometric properties. These are used to initialize and serve as priors for the segmentation. The performance of the method has been demonstrated with 10 datasets from a clinical ADPKD study.