Computer-aided renal cancer quantification and classification from contrast-enhanced CT via histograms of curvature-related features

In clinical practice, renal cancer diagnosis is performed by manual quantifications of tumor size and enhancement, which are time consuming and show high variability. We propose a computer-assisted clinical tool to assess and classify renal tumors in contrast-enhanced CT for the management and classification of kidney tumors. The quantification of lesions used level-sets and a statistical refinement step to adapt to the shape of the lesions. Intra-patient and inter-phase registration facilitated the study of lesion enhancement. From the segmented lesions, the histograms of curvature-related features were used to classify the lesion types via random sampling. The clinical tool allows the accurate quantification and classification of cysts and cancer from clinical data. Cancer types are further classified into four categories. Computer-assisted image analysis shows great potential for tumor diagnosis and monitoring.