KidNet

Abstract

Kidney cancer is one of the 10 most common cancers in both men and women. The lifetime risk for one developing kidney cancer is about 1.6%. The rate of kidney cancer diagnosis has been rising since the 1990s due to the use of newer imaging tests such as CT scans. The kidneys are deep inside the body and hence small kidney tumours cannot be seen or felt during a physical examination. Existing work on kidney tumour diagnosis uses traditional machine learning and image processing techniques to find and classify the images. Deep learning systems do not require this domain-specific knowledge. The kidney tumour diagnosis system uses deep learning and convolutional neural networks to classify CT images. A deep learning neural network model named KidNet has been implemented. It has been trained using labelled kidney CT images. To achieve acceleration during the training phase, GPUs have been used. The network when trained with abdominal CT images achieved 86.1% accuracy, and the one trained with cropped portion of kidney images achieved 89.6% accuracy.