Inspection of visible components in urine based on deep learning

Purpose Urinary particles are particularly important parameters in clinical urinalysis, especially for the diagnosis of nephropathy. Therefore, it is highly important to precisely detect urinary particles in the clinical setting. However, artificial microscopy is subjective and time consuming, and various previous detection algorithms lack the adequate accuracy. In this study, a method is proposed for the analysis of urinary particles based on deep learning. Methods We used seven cellular components (i.e., erythrocytes, leukocytes, epithelial, low‐transitional epithelium, casts, crystal, and squamous epithelial cells) in the microscopic imaging of urine as the detection targets. After the extraction of features using Resnet50, feature maps of different sizes are obtained in the last few layers of the feature pyramid net (FPN). The feature maps are then input into the classification subnetwork and regression subnetwork for classification and localization respectively, and detection results are obtained. First, we introduce the basic model (RetinaNet) to detect the cellular components in urinary particles, and the features of the objects can then be extracted more effectively by replacing different basic networks. Lastly, the effects of different weight initialization methods and different anchor scales on the performance of the model are investigated. Results We obtained the optimal network structure based on the adjustment of the loss functional parameters, thereby achieving the best results in the test set of urinary particles. The experimental data yielded an accuracy of 88.65% with a processing time of only 0.2 s for each image on a GeForce GTX 1080 graphics processing unit (GPU). Our results demonstrate that this method cannot only achieve the speed of the first‐stage target detector, but also the accuracy of the two‐stage target algorithm in the analysis of urinary particles. Conclusion This study developed new automated analysis urinary particles based on deep learning, and this method is expected to be used for the automated analysis and detection of urinary particles. Moreover, our approach will be useful for the detection of other cells in the clinical setting.