Ultrasonic thickness evaluation of seminiferous tubule by fuzzy inference

This paper describes a seminiferous tubules evaluation using an ultrasonic probe. In this system, we evaluate a diameter of seminiferous tubules for azoospermia patients. We employ a 5.0MHz ultrasonic single probe. In the experiment, we employ large and small nylon lines as the healthy and unhealthy seminiferous tubules. We made ball shape phantom from small and large lines in total 24. We acquire the waveforms by the ultrasonic probe and calculate amplitude values from the data that band pass filters applied. We then calculate cumulative relative frequency of amplitude values. Fuzzy if-then rules are made for the cumulative relative frequency of large and small lines. We evaluate a rate of large lines among all lines by using the fuzzy MIN-MAX center-of-gravity method. In the result, the mean absolute error was 5.98%. The correlation coefficient was 0.98. The proposed method thus successfully evaluated the rate of the large lines.