myStone: A system for automatic kidney stone classification

- First attempt at automatic classification of kidney stones.
- Construction of a device for the visual recognition of renal calculi.
- First extensive dataset of kidney stone images of 908 fragments.
- Design of features and classifier attaining 63% accuracy.
- A boost in performance is possible with the use of the urinary pH level.

Kidney stone formation is a common disease and the incidence rate is constantly increasing worldwide. It has been shown that the classification of kidney stones can lead to an important reduction of the recurrence rate. The classification of kidney stones by human experts on the basis of certain visual color and texture features is one of the most employed techniques. However, the knowledge of how to analyze kidney stones is not widespread, and the experts learn only after being trained on a large number of samples of the different classes. In this paper we describe a new device specifically designed for capturing images of expelled kidney stones, and a method to learn and apply the experts knowledge with regard to their classification. We show that with off the shelf components, a carefully selected set of features and a state of the art classifier it is possible to automate this difficult task to a good degree. We report results on a collection of 454 kidney stones, achieving an overall accuracy of 63% for a set of eight classes covering almost all of the kidney stones taxonomy. Moreover, for more than 80% of samples the real class is the first or the second most probable class according to the system, being then the patient recommendations for the two top classes similar. This is the first attempt towards the automatic visual classification of kidney stones, and based on the current results we foresee better accuracies with the increase of the dataset size.