Deep learning-based automated kidney and cyst segmentation of autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease using single vs. multi-institutional data

Purpose This study aimed to investigate if a deep learning model trained with a single institution's data has comparable accuracy to that trained with multi-institutional data for segmenting kidney and cyst regions in magnetic resonance (MR) images of patients affected by autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD). Methods We used TensorFlow with a Keras custom UNet on 2D slices of 756 MRI images of kidneys with ADPKD obtained from four institutions in the Consortium for Radiologic Imaging Studies of Polycystic Kidney Disease (CRISP) study. The ground truth was determined via a manual plus global thresholding method. Five models were trained with 80 % of all institutional data (n = 604) and each institutional data (n = 232, 172, 148, or 52), respectively, and validated with 10 % and tested on an unseen 10 % of the data. The model's performance was evaluated using the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC). Results The DSCs by the model trained with all institutional data ranged from 0.92 to 0.95 for kidney image segmentation, only 1–2 % higher than those by the models trained with single institutional data (0.90–0.93).In cyst segmentation, however, the DSCs by the model trained with all institutional data ranged from 0.83 to 0.89, which were 2–20 % higher than those by the models trained with single institutional data (0.66–0.86). Conclusion The UNet performance, when trained with a single institutional dataset, exhibited similar accuracy to the model trained on a multi-institutional dataset. Segmentation accuracy increases with models trained on larger sample sizes, especially in more complex cyst segmentation.