Accurate colon residue detection algorithm with partial volume segmentation

Abstract

Colon cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. Earlier detection and removal of polyps can dramatically reduce the chance of developing malignant tumor. Due to some limitations of optical colonoscopy used in clinic, many researchers have developed virtual colonoscopy as an alternative technique, in which accurate colon segmentation is crucial. However, partial volume effect and existence of residue make it very challenging. The electronic colon cleaning technique proposed by Chen et al is a very attractive method, which is also kind of hard segmentation method. As mentioned in their paper, some artifacts were produced, which might affect the accurate colon reconstruction. In our paper, instead of labeling each voxel with a unique label or tissue type, the percentage of different tissues within each voxel, which we call a mixture, was considered in establishing a maximum a posterior probability (MAP) image-segmentation framework. A Markov random field (MRF) model was developed to reflect the spatial information for the tissue mixtures. The spatial information based on hard segmentation was used to determine which tissue types are in the specific voxel. Parameters of each tissue class were estimated by the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm during the MAP tissue-mixture segmentation. Real CT experimental results demonstrated that the partial volume effects between four tissue types have been precisely detected. Meanwhile, the residue has been electronically removed and very smooth and clean interface along the colon wall has been obtained.