Study of visual uroflowmetry with color laser-light sheets

Abstract

This paper presents a visual uroflowmetry to evaluate morphological information on male urination using a color video camera and color laser-light sheets. The most notable feature of this method is its ability to obtain the measurements on urinary morphology, such as total sectional area, spatial dispersion, and number of splits in the urinary streamline, in addition to the information on voiding time, voiding volume, and flow rate obtained by conventional uroflowmetry. Since lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) are related to morphology of urination according to the cause of disease, it is expected that the evaluation of morphological information on urination enables urologists to better understand the symptom of their patients. For the present method, the authors experimentally evaluate the measurement accuracy of urine flow rate for three different models of urination, for example benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). Furthermore, the present method is applied to the morphological measurement of the urine flow divided into two parts to demonstrate that it successfully obtains morphological information of urination.