Segmentation of colon and removal of opacified fluid for virtual colonoscopy

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common type of cancer. The use of techniques such as flexible sigmoidoscopy and capsule endoscopy for the screening of colorectal cancer causes physical pain and hardship to the patients. Hence, to overcome the above disadvantages, computed tomography (CT) can be employed for the identification of polyps or growth, while screening for CRC. This proposed approach was implemented to improve the accuracy and to reduce the computation time of the accurate segmentation of the colon segments from the abdominal CT images which contain anatomical organs such as lungs, small bowels, large bowels (Colon), ribs, opacified fluid and bones. The segmentation is performed in two major steps. The first step segments the air-filled colon portions by placing suitable seed points using modified 3D seeded region growing which identify and match the similar voxels by 6-neighborhood connectivity technique. The segmentation of the opacified fluid portions is done using fuzzy connectedness approach enhanced with interval thresholding. The membership classes are defined and the voxels are categorized based on the class value. Interval thresholding is performed so that the bones and opacified fluid parts may be extracted. The bones are removed by the placement of seed points as the existence of the continuity of the bone region is more in the axial slices. The resultant image containing bones is subtracted from the threshold output to segment the opacified fluid segments in all the axial slices of a dataset. Finally, concatenation of the opacified fluid with the segmented colon is performed for the 3D rendering of the segmented colon. This method was implemented in 15 datasets downloaded from TCIA and in real-time dataset in both supine and prone position and the accuracy achieved was 98.73%.