High-Performance CAD-CTC Scheme Using Shape Index, Multiscale Enhancement Filters, and Radiomic Features.

OBJECTIVE: Computer-aided detection (CAD) systems for computed tomography colonography (CTC) can automatically detect colorectal polyps. The main problem of currently developed CAD-CTC systems is the numerous false positives (FPs) caused by the existence of complicated colon structures (e.g., haustral fold, residual fecal material, inflation tube, and ileocecal valve). This study proposes a CAD-CTC scheme using shape index, multiscale enhancement filters, and radiomic features to address the FP issue.

METHODS: Shape index and multiscale enhancement filter calculated in the Gaussian smoothed geodesic distance field are combined to generate the polyp candidates. A total of 440 well-defined radiomic features collected from previous radiomic studies and 200 newly developed radiomic features are used to construct a supervised classification model to reduce the numerous FPs.

RESULTS: The proposed CAD-CTC scheme was evaluated on 152 oral contrast-enhanced CT datasets from 76 patients with 103 polyps ≥5 mm. The detection results were 98.1% and 95.3% by-polyp sensitivity and per-scan sensitivity, respectively, with the same FP rate of 1.3 FPs per dataset for polyps ≥5 mm.

CONCLUSION: Experimental results indicate that the proposed CAD-CTC scheme can achieve high sensitivity while maintaining a low FP rate.

SIGNIFICANCE: The proposed CAD-CTC scheme would be a beneficial tool in clinical colon examination.