Computer-aided detection of polyps on oral contrast-enhanced CT colonography.

Summers RM, Franaszek M, Miller MT, Pickhardt PJ, Choi JR, Schindler WR recently published large clinical trial suggests that CT colonography may play an important role for total colonic screening [1]. The high sensitivity and specificity of polyp detection reported from the trial in part may have resulted from the use of oral contrast enhancement [2]. With the administration of small amounts of oral contrast agents, residual fluid and feces become identifiable [3]. Bowel opacification, however, introduces a new challenge for computer-aided detection (CAD) of polyps on CT colonography because most CAD is designed to find polyps only in the air-filled colon. The purpose of this report is to discuss a CAD system that detects polyps in the opacified colon. The system consists of a bowel preparation, a colon segmentation algorithm, a fluid subtraction algorithm, and a CAD scheme.

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