An Automated Bladder Volume Measurement for Assisting Diagnosis in Lower Urinary Tract Dysfunction

Volume of the urinary bladder is an important factor for diagnosis of lower urinary tract dysfunction (LUTD). Clinically, the need of urinary catheter insertion procedure is determined by the amount of residual urine inside bladder through bladder sonography. If for each time the urination volume is less than the volume inside bladder, it will increase the residual urine volume gradually. As a result, the patient fails to urinate and urinary retention is occurred. In order to release retention, it is needed to insert urinary catheter into the urinary bladder. The approach currently being used in clinical is to estimate the residual urine from ultrasound image via an equation (Volume = Length × Width × Height × 0.52), in which human efforts are required. Besides, the resulting measurement is still not accurate enough. Therefore, a solution that treat each pixel signature vector in bladder as the target signal to do classification is proposed in this paper.