Automated classification of renal tumors on ultrasound images using deep neural network

Kidney cancer is one of the most common cancers worldwide. The major types of malignant renal tumors are renal cell carcinoma and urothelial carcinoma. Although the majority of renal tumors are malignant, up to $20\%$ are benign, most commonly renal cyst and angiomyolipomas. Ultrasound is the most accessible imaging tool in medical practice, but it highly depends on operator skill, which may lead to high false-negative rate in diagnosis. The purpose of this study was to develop a predictive model for the automated classification of renal tumors on ultrasound images using deep neural network. A total of 880 kidney ultrasound images were used for training and testing. Transfer learning was used to the ten Convolution neural network models. The kidney ultrasound images were classified as benign or malignant tumors. The classification performance of the model was evaluated by sensitivity and specificity. The research results show that VGG18 yielded the best performance, with a sensitivity of $79 \%$, and a specificity of $86 \%$.