School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China.
Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 2013 Jan;109(1):1-12. doi: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2012.08.012. Epub 2012 Sep 2.
The technique of virtual colon unfolding (VU) is a non-invasive procedure to detect polyps on the colon inner wall. Compared with conventional virtual colonoscopy, VU is faster and results in fewer uninspected regions. However, the performance of VU is more vulnerable to the quality of colon segmentation. In this paper, an improved colon segmentation method is proposed to enhance the performance of VU. The improved method is with the use of a novel post-processing scheme, which is composed of two parts: attain more accurate centerlines with the help of scalar complementary geodesic distance field and compensate gap-like artifacts based on local morphological information. We validated the improved method on twenty colon cases via two widely used VU techniques, the ray-casting technique and the conformal-mapping technique. Experimental results indicated that with the use of the improved method, the rates of correct response via ray-casting and conformal-mapping techniques were respectively elevated by 14.9% and 13.1%, while the rates of false response were respectively reduced by 8.4% and 10.8%.
虚拟结肠展开（VU）技术是一种非侵入性的方法，用于检测结肠内壁的息肉。与传统的虚拟结肠镜检查相比，VU 更快，并且导致未检查区域更少。然而，VU 的性能更容易受到结肠分割质量的影响。本文提出了一种改进的结肠分割方法，以增强 VU 的性能。改进的方法使用了一种新颖的后处理方案，该方案由两部分组成：借助标量互补测地距离场获得更准确的中心线，并基于局部形态学信息补偿类似间隙的伪影。我们通过两种广泛使用的 VU 技术，即光线投射技术和共形映射技术，在二十个结肠病例上验证了改进的方法。实验结果表明，使用改进的方法，光线投射和共形映射技术的正确响应率分别提高了 14.9%和 13.1%，而错误响应率分别降低了 8.4%和 10.8%。
