Grading Prenatal Hydronephrosis from Ultrasound Imaging Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

We evaluate the performance of a Deep Convolutional Neural Network in grading the severity of prenatal hydronephrosis (PHN), one of the most common congenital urological anomalies, from renal ultrasound images. We present results on a variety of classification tasks based on clinically defined grades of severity, including predictions of whether or not an ultrasound image represents a case that is at high risk for further complications requiring surgical intervention with approximately 80% accuracy. The prediction rates obtained by the model are well beyond the rates of agreement among trained clinicians, suggesting that this work can lead to a useful diagnostic aid.