Improved Diagnosis and Navigation for CT Colonography

The goal of this research project is to develop a fast, accurate, and patient-friendly computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) component of CT colonography, that improves the robustness and accuracy of current colon wall segmentation and achieves earlier colorectal cancer diagnoses through an improved polyp detection method. Many advanced image processing techniques are applied to clearly outline the colon wall in the CT data set of human abdomen, and subtract the colon portion from the entire data set. After the subtraction, the detailed information and the surface curvature information on the colon wall is analyzed. The active contour model is assisted by presegmentation steps including mathematical morphology filtering, edge detection and other image processing techniques