A New Algorithm of Electronic Cleansing for Weak Faecal-Tagging CT Colonography

Abstract

Abstract. CT Colonography (CTC) has emerged as a mainstream clinical practice of colonic cancer screening and diagnosis. One of the most critical problems is to increase compliance with CTC examinations via minimal bowel preparation (i.e., weak faecal-tagging), which nevertheless causes much lower signal-noise-ratio than conventional preparation.In this paper, we present a new algorithm pipeline of electronically cleansing tagging materials in CTC under reduced oral contrast dose. Our method has the following steps: 1, robust structure parsing to generate a list of volume regions of interest (ROIs) of tagging material (avoiding bone erosion); 2, effectively locating local tagging-air (AT) transitional surface regions; 3, a novel discriminative-generative algorithm to learn the higher-order image appearance model in AT using 3D Markov Random Fields (MRF); 4, accurate probability density function based voxel labeling corresponding to semantic classes. Validated on 26 weak faecaltagging CTC cases from 3 medical sites, our method yields better visualization clarity and readability compared with the previous approach [1]. The whole system computes efficiently (e.g., < 40 seconds for CT images of 512 × 512 × 1000+).

Progress in Fully Automated Abdominal CT Interpretation

“…Electronic cleansing of the colon in the laxative-free or reduced-preparation setting has been proposed with promising results [99–102]. The use of dual-energy CT for electronic cleansing has been proposed [103–105].…”

Self-Supervised Adversarial Learning with a Limited Dataset for Electronic Cleansing in Computed Tomographic Colonography: A Preliminary Feasibility Study

“…Therefore, the accuracy of EC is limited to the underlying physical voxel resolution of the CT image volume, whereas realistic EC outcomes require resolving the output CT values with subvoxel accuracy. Subsequent methods attempted to address this issue by sophisticated mathematical modeling of the multiple material fractions contained within each voxel [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 ]. However, these methods were still vulnerable to uncertainties due to the ambiguity of CT values and due to pseudo-enhancement effects of the contrast agent on the CTC images [ 15 ].…”