Adaptive correction of the pseudo-enhancement of CT attenuation for fecal-tagging CT colonography

Abstract

In fecal-tagging CT colonography (ftCTC), positive-contrast tagging agents are used for opacifying residual bowel materials to facilitate reliable detection of colorectal lesions. However, tagging agents that have high radiodensity tend to artificially elevate the observed CT attenuation of nearby materials toward that of tagged materials on Hounsfield unit (HU) scale. We developed an image-based adaptive density-correction (ADC) method for minimizing such pseudo-enhancement effect in ftCTC data. After the correction, we can confidently assume that soft-tissue materials and air are represented by their standard CT attenuations, whereas higher CT attenuations indicate tagged materials. The ADC method was optimized by use of an anthropomorphic phantom filled partially with three concentrations of a tagging agent. The effect of ADC on ftCTC was assessed visually and quantitatively by comparison of the accuracy of computer-aided detection (CAD) without and with the use of the ADC method in two different types of clinical ftCTC databases: 20 laxative ftCTC cases with 24 polyps, and 23 reduced-preparation ftCTC cases with 28 polyps. Visual evaluation indicated that ADC minimizes the observed pseudo-enhancement effect. With ADC, the free-response receiver operating characteristic curves indicating CAD performance in polyp detection yielded normalized partial area-under-curve values of 0.91 and 0.80 for the two databases, respectively, with statistically significant improvement over conventional thresholding-based approaches (p<0.05). The results indicate that ADC is a useful method for reducing the pseudo-enhancement effect and for improving CAD performance in CTC.