Java-based plugin for Renal Depth Measurement

This work presents an ImageJ plugin that was developed to measure the skin-to-kidney distance on planar lateral scintilographic images for academic research and clinical environment in nuclear medicine. The software was written in JAVA, has an open source code, is cross-platform and named renal depth measurement (RDM). Validation tests were performed in lateral images simulated with SimSET code, using five anthropomorphic GSF voxel phantoms. The quantitative analysis was compared with the empirical renal depth formula, developed by Raynaud. The depth measurements using the RDM plugin showed that the errors compared with the true renal depth are around -18% and 10% for the interactive delimitation method and around -7% and 10% for automatic method When compared with Raynaud formula, there is a reduction of the renal depth errors in up to 25%, especially inpatients with variability in renal depth.