An Intensive Review on the Noninvasive Methods to Measure the Urinary Bladder Volume Using Ultrasound Images

Ultrasound is an important diagnostic tool in distinguishing interfaces between soft tissues, especially abdominal structures. Diagnostic ultrasound is used for the detection of cysts, tumors or cancers present in the abdomen. Bladder cancer is one of the common types of cancer nowadays. The volume of the bladder is less in case of presence of cyst, tumors or cancers. Considering the importance of measurement of volume of the urinary bladder, various invasive and noninvasive methods are discussed in this article. The invasive method has many disadvantages. Hence this article encompasses the various noninvasive methods and its implementation using imaging techniques are discussed. The imaging techniques include Prolate Ellipsoid Method, Double Area Method and Double Ellipsoid Method. The methodology which is being generally used to calculate the volume of the urinary bladder is Prolate Ellipsoid Method. The accuracy of the above mentioned methods is reported with relatively larger errors of about 60%. The accuracy can be increased by incorporating sophisticated, expensive 3D software packages and imaging tools.