City Research Online

Abstract

Accurate and automatic colon segmentation from CT images is a crucial step of many clinical applications in CT colonography, including computer-aided detection (CAD) of colon polyps, 3-D virtual flythrough of the colon, and prone/supine registration. However, the existence of adjacent air-filled organs such as the lung, stomach, and small intestine, and the collapse of the colon due to poor insufflation, render accurate segmentation of the colon a difficult problem. Extra-colonic components can be categorized into two types based on their 3-D connection to the colon: detached and attached extracolonic components (DEC and AEC, respectively). In this paper, we propose graph inference methods to remove extracolonic components to achieve a high quality segmentation. We first decompose each 3-D air-filled object into a set of 3-D regions. A classifier trained with region-level features can be used to identify the colon regions from noncolon regions. After removing obvious DEC, we remove the remaining DEC by modeling the global anatomic structure with an a priori topological constraint and solving a graph inference problem using semantic information provided by a multiclass classifier. Finally, we remove AEC by modeling regions within each 3-D object with a hierarchical conditional random field, solved by graph cut. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms a purely discriminative learning method in detecting true colon regions, while decreasing extra-colonic components in challenging clinical data that includes collapsed cases.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science R Medicine > RC Internal medicine
Departments:	School of Science & Technology > Computer Science
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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