3D colonic polyp detection in CT images using template matching

Abstract

In this paper we present a computer aided detection (CAD) system for colonic polyp detection incomputed tomography (CT) images. Here, the segmentation of the colon region was performed inthree steps which are thresholding, labeling and analyzing the shape morphologies using decisionrules. After extracting the colon region, searching with 3D semi-spherical polyp template wasperformed to detect the polyps. Because the polyps can appear in all possible orientations on thecolon wall, 3D rotations were performed during the search. The similarity was measured usingconvolution operation. The performance of the system was evaluated using a test set containing 20cases having 13 polyps which were marked by expert radiologists. When the results were comparedwith the reviews of the radiologists, it was seen that the system achieved 92.3% sensitivity with 0.84FP regions per polyp.