Computer Aided Polyp Detection with Texture Analysis

We present a novel pipeline for computer-aided detection (CAD) of colonic polyps by integrating texture analysis with volume rendering and conformal colon flattening. Using our method, the 3D polyp automatic detection problem is converted into a 2D image analysis problem. The colon surface is first segmented and extracted from the CT data set of the abdomen, which is then mapped to a 2D rectangle using conformal mapping. This flattened colon is rendered using a direct volume rendering technique with a translucent electronic biopsy transfer function. The polyps are detected by a 2D clustering method on the flattened image. The false positives are further reduced by analyzing the volumetric shape features of suspicious regions. Compared with shape based methods, our method is more efficient without the need of computing curvature and other shape parameters for the whole colon wall.