title: Endoluminal surface registration for CT colonography using haustral fold matching.
abstract: Computed Tomographic (CT) colonography is a technique used for the detection of bowel cancer or potentially precancerous polyps. The procedure is performed routinely with the patient both prone and supine to differentiate fixed colonic pathology from mobile faecal residue. Matching corresponding locations is difficult and time consuming for radiologists due to colonic deformations that occur during patient repositioning. We propose a novel method to establish correspondence between the two acquisitions automatically. The problem is first simplified by detecting haustral folds using a graph cut method applied to a curvature-based metric applied to a surface mesh generated from segmentation of the colonic lumen. A virtual camera is used to create a set of images that provide a metric for matching pairs of folds between the prone and supine acquisitions. Image patches are generated at the fold positions using depth map renderings of the endoluminal surface and optimised by performing a virtual camera registration over a restricted set of degrees of freedom. The intensity difference between image pairs, along with additional neighbourhood information to enforce geometric constraints over a 2D parameterisation of the 3D space, are used as unary and pair-wise costs respectively, and included in a Markov Random Field (MRF) model to estimate the maximum a posteriori fold labelling assignment. The method achieved fold matching accuracy of 96.0% and 96.1% in patient cases with and without local colonic collapse. Moreover, it improved upon an existing surface-based registration algorithm by providing an initialisation. The set of landmark correspondences is used to non-rigidly transform a 2D source image derived from a conformal mapping process on the 3D endoluminal surface mesh. This achieves full surface correspondence between prone and supine views and can be further refined with an intensity based registration showing a statistically significant improvement (p<0.001), and decreasing mean error from 11.9 mm to 6.0 mm measured at 1743 reference points from 17 CTC datasets.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. Electronic address: thomas.hampshire.09@ucl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hampshire
authors.forename: Holger R
authors.initials: HR
authors.lastname: Roth
authors.forename: Emma
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Helbren
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Plumb
authors.forename: Darren
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Boone
authors.forename: Greg
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Slabaugh
authors.forename: Steve
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Halligan
authors.forename: David J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Hawkes
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D023881:Colonography, Computed Tomographic / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D011856:Radiographic Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D011857:Radiographic Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D013382:Subtraction Technique
keywords: CT colonography; Haustral fold; Landmark; Markov random field; Registration