Deep learning classification of urinary sediment crystals with optimal parameter tuning

The examination of urinary sediment crystals, the sedimentary components of urine, is useful in screening tests, and is always performed in medical examinations. The examination of urinary sediment crystals is typically done by classifying them under a microscope. Although automated analyzers are commercially available, manual classification is required, which is time-consuming and varies depending on the technologist performing the test and the laboratory. A set of test images was created, consisting of training, validation, and test images. The training images were transformed and augmented using various methods. The test images were classified to determine the patterns that could be correctly classified. Convolutional neural networks were used for training. Furthermore, we also considered the case where the crystal subcategories were not treated as separate. Learning with all parameters except the random cropping parameter showed the highest accuracy value. Treating the subcategories together or separately did not seem to affect the accuracy value. The accuracy of the best pattern was 0.918. When matched to a real-world case, the percentage of correct answers was 88%. Although the number of images was limited, good results were obtained in the classification of crystal images with optimal parameter tuning. The parameter optimization performed in this study can be used as a reference for future studies, with the goal of image classification by deep learning in clinical practice.