Electronic Cleansing for Computed Tomography (CT) Colonography Using a Scale-Invariant Three-Material Model

Abstract

A well-known reading pitfall in computed tomography (CT) colonography is posed by artifacts at T-junctions, i.e., locations where air-fluid levels interface with the colon wall. This paper presents a scale-invariant method to determine material fractions in voxels near such T-junctions. The proposed electronic cleansing method particularly improves the segmentation at those locations. The algorithm takes a vector of Gaussian derivatives as input features. The measured features are made invariant to the orientation-dependent apparent scale of the data and normalized in a way to obtain equal noise variance. A so-called parachute model is introduced that maps Gaussian derivatives onto material fractions near T-junctions. Projection of the noisy derivatives onto the model yields improved estimates of the true, underlying feature values. The method is shown to render an accurate representation of the object boundary without artifacts near junctions. Therefore, it enhances the reading of CT colonography in a 3-D display mode.