title: An improved electronic colon cleansing method for detection of colonic polyps by virtual colonoscopy.
abstract: Electronic colon cleansing (ECC) aims to segment the colon lumen from a patient abdominal image acquired using an oral contrast agent for colonic material tagging, so that a virtual colon model can be constructed. Virtual colonoscopy (VC) provides fly-through navigation within the colon model, looking for polyps on the inner surface in a manner analogous to that of fiber optic colonoscopy. We have built an ECC pipeline for a commercial VC navigation system. In this paper, we present an improved ECC method. It is based on a partial-volume (PV) image-segmentation framework, which is derived using the well-established statistical expectation-maximization algorithm. The presented ECC method was evaluated by both visual inspection and computer-aided detection of polyps (CADpolyp) within the cleansed colon lumens obtained using 20 patient datasets. Compared to our previous ECC pipeline, which does not sufficiently consider the PV effect, the method presented in this paper demonstrates improved polyp detection by both visual judgment and CADpolyp measure.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY 11794 USA.
authors.forename: Zigang
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Zhengrong
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.forename: Xiang
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Lihong
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Bin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Daria
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Eremina
authors.forename: Hongbing
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lu
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003111:Colonic Polyps / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D023881:Colonography, Computed Tomographic / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods; D011856:Radiographic Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D011857:Radiographic Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity