Department of Electric Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, ROC.
School of Medicine, Tzu Chi University, Hualien, Taiwan, ROC.
PLoS One. 2023 May 11;18(5):e0284142. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284142. eCollection 2023.
To explore the interior of a lesion in a 3D endoluminal view, this study investigates the application of an 'electronic biopsy' (EB) technique to computed tomographic colonography (CTC) for further differentiation and 2D image correlation of endoluminal lesions in the air spaces. A retrospective study of sixty-two various endoluminal lesions from thirty patients (13 males, 17 females; age range, 31 to 90 years) was approved by our institutional review board and evaluated. The endoluminal lesions were segmented using gray-level threshold and reconstructed into isosurfaces using a marching cube algorithm. EB allows users to interactively erode and apply grey-level mapping (GM) to the surface of the region of interest (ROI) in 3D CTC. Radiologists conducted the clinical evaluation, and the resulting data were analyzed. EB significantly improves 3D gray-level presentation for evaluating the surface and inside of endoluminal lesions over that of SR, GM or target GM (TGM) (P < 0.01) with preservation of the 3D spatial effect. Moreover, 3D to 2D image correlation were achieved in any layer of the lesion using EB as did GM/TGM on the surface. The specificity and diagnostic accuracy of EB are significantly greater than those of SR (P < 0.01). These performance can be better further with GM/TGM and reach the best with EB (specificity, 89.3-92.9%; accuracy, 95.2-96.8%). EB can be used in CTC to improve the differentiation of endoluminal lesions. EB increases 3D to 2D image correlations of the lesions on or beneath the lesion surface.
为了从腔内 3D 视图中探索病变内部结构，本研究探讨了“电子活检”（EB）技术在 CT 结肠成像（CTC）中的应用，以进一步区分腔内病变并对腔内病变在气腔内的 2D 图像进行相关性分析。对 30 名患者（13 名男性，17 名女性；年龄 31 至 90 岁）的 62 种不同腔内病变进行了回顾性研究，该研究得到了我们机构审查委员会的批准并进行了评估。使用灰度阈值对腔内病变进行分割，并使用 Marching Cube 算法将其重建为等距曲面。EB 允许用户在 3D CTC 中对感兴趣区域（ROI）的表面进行交互式侵蚀并应用灰度级映射（GM）。放射科医生进行了临床评估，并对所得数据进行了分析。与 SR、GM 或目标 GM（TGM）相比，EB 显著改善了 3D 灰度显示，从而可以更好地评估腔内病变的表面和内部（P < 0.01），同时保留了 3D 空间效果。此外，使用 EB 可以在病变的任何层面实现 3D 至 2D 图像相关性，与 GM/TGM 一样可以在表面实现相关性。EB 的特异性和诊断准确性明显高于 SR（P < 0.01）。通过 GM/TGM 可以进一步提高这些性能，而 EB 则可以达到最佳效果（特异性，89.3-92.9%；准确性，95.2-96.8%）。EB 可用于 CTC 以改善腔内病变的区分。EB 增加了病变表面或下方的病变的 3D 至 2D 图像相关性。
