A novel minimal surface overlay model for the whole colon wall segmentation

Abstract

To segment the boundary of both inner and outer colon wall is of much significance for colonic polyps detection in computed tomographic colonography (CTC). However, the low contrast of CT attenuation values between colon wall and the surrounding tissues limits many traditional algorithms to achieve this task. Moreover, when sticking presents between two colon walls, the task turns to be much more complicated and the threshold level set segmentation method may fail in this situation. In view of this, we present a minimum surface overlay model to extract the inner wall in this paper. Combined with the superposition model, we are able to depict the outer wall of colon in a natural way. We validated the proposed algorithm based on 60 CTC datasets. Compared with the golden standard (the manual drawing by experts), the new presented method achieved with more than 95% overlapping coverage rate (OCR).