Chowdhury Tarik A, Whelan Paul F, Ghita Ovidiu
Vision Systems Group, School of Electronic Engineering, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland.
IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2008 Mar;55(3):888-901. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2007.909506.
Computed tomography colonography (CTC) is a rapidly evolving noninvasive medical investigation that is viewed by radiologists as a potential screening technique for the detection of colorectal polyps. Due to the technical advances in CT system design, the volume of data required to be processed by radiologists has increased significantly, and as a consequence the manual analysis of this information has become an increasingly time consuming process whose results can be affected by inter- and intrauser variability. The aim of this paper is to detail the implementation of a fully integrated CAD-CTC system that is able to robustly identify the clinically significant polyps in the CT data. The CAD-CTC system described in this paper is a multistage implementation whose main system components are: 1) automatic colon segmentation; 2) candidate surface extraction; 3) feature extraction; and 4) classification. Our CAD-CTC system performs at 100% sensitivity for polyps larger than 10 mm, 92% sensitivity for polyps in the range 5 to 10 mm, and 57.14% sensitivity for polyps smaller than 5 mm with an average of 3.38 false positives per dataset. The developed system has been evaluated on synthetic and real patient CT data acquired with standard and low-dose radiation levels.
计算机断层结肠成像（CTC）是一种快速发展的非侵入性医学检查方法，放射科医生将其视为检测结直肠息肉的潜在筛查技术。由于CT系统设计的技术进步，放射科医生需要处理的数据量显著增加，因此对这些信息的人工分析已成为一个越来越耗时的过程，其结果可能会受到用户间和用户内变异性的影响。本文的目的是详细介绍一个完全集成的CAD-CTC系统的实现，该系统能够在CT数据中可靠地识别具有临床意义的息肉。本文所述的CAD-CTC系统是一个多阶段实现，其主要系统组件包括：1）自动结肠分割；2）候选表面提取；3）特征提取；4）分类。我们的CAD-CTC系统对大于10mm的息肉的敏感度为100%，对5至10mm范围内的息肉的敏感度为92%，对小于5mm的息肉的敏感度为57.14%，每个数据集平均有3.38个假阳性。所开发的系统已在使用标准和低剂量辐射水平采集的合成和真实患者CT数据上进行了评估。
