An Improved Electronic Colon Cleansing Method for Detection of Colonic Polyps by Virtual Colonoscopy

Zigang Wang, Zhengrong Liang, Xiang Li, Lihong Li, Bin Li, D. Eremina, Hongbing Lu
2006 IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering  
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
more » ... 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. Index Terms-CAD, image segmentation, partial volume effect, virtual colonoscopy.
doi:10.1109/tbme.2006.877793 pmid:16916098 pmcid:PMC1550780 fatcat:c4b7uigelrandlnnlj5q2w4fkm