The Open Kidney Ultrasound Data Set

Abstract

Ultrasound, because of its low cost, non-ionizing, and non-invasive characteristics, has established itself as a cornerstone radiological examination. Research on ultrasound applications has also expanded, especially with image analysis with machine learning. However, ultrasound data are frequently restricted to closed data sets, with only a few openly available. Despite being a frequently examined organ, the kidney lacks a publicly available ultrasonography data set. The proposed Open Kidney Ultrasound Data Set is the first publicly available set of kidney brightness mode (B-mode) ultrasound data that includes annotations for multi-class semantic segmentation. It is based on data retrospectively collected in a 5-year period from over 500 patients with a mean age of 53.2 +/- 14.7 years, body mass index of 27.0 +/- 5.4 kg/m2, and most common primary diseases being diabetes mellitus, immunoglobulin A (IgA) nephropathy, and hypertension. There are labels for the view and fine-grained manual annotations from two expert sonographers. Notably, this data includes native and transplanted kidneys. Initial bench-marking measurements are performed, demonstrating a state-of-the-art algorithm achieving a Dice Sorenson Coefficient of 0.85 for the kidney capsule. This data set is a high-quality data set, including two sets of expert annotations, with a larger breadth of images than previously available. In increasing access to kidney ultrasound data, future researchers may be able to create novel image analysis techniques for tissue characterization, disease detection, and prognostication.