A New Visualization Method for Virtual Colonoscopy

Virtual colonoscopy or ‘colonography’ is a patient-friendly, modern screening technique for polyps. Automatic detection of polyps can serve to assist the radiologist. This paper presents a method based on clustering the principal curvatures. Via automatic polyp detection 5/6 polyps (>5 mm) were detected at the expense of 9 false positive findings per case. For visualization, the bowel surface is presented to the physician in a ‘panoramic’ way as a sequence of unfolded cubes. Conventionally, only 93% of the colon surface is available for examination. In our approach the area in view is increased to 99.8%. The unfolded cube visualization is another step to optimize polyp detection by visual examination. Experiments show a sensitivity of 10/10 (on a per patient basis) for any polyp. The specificity was 7/10. Category: long paper