Morphological Lesion Detection in CT Colonography

描述(由申请人提供)： 在工业化国家，结直肠癌是癌症死亡的第二大原因。目前的筛查技术缺乏足够的敏感性，或者价格昂贵，需要患者镇静。该项目旨在开发一套新的工具，以帮助医生使用CT结肠成像检测癌症病变，这是一种新的筛查技术，对患者来说是快速和无痛的。这些工具基于计算机化检测算法的概念，作为后备阅读器，其主要目标是确保临床医生对可疑病变发出警报。这种检测算法被设计成快速、灵敏和特异的--能够检测出使用目前的技术经常被遗漏的息肉，因为它们被埋在结肠的褶皱上。根据该计划开发的工具还可以帮助临床医生对病变进行亚型划分，并将为量化病变随时间的增长提供强大的研究工具。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in industrialized nations. Current screening techniques lack sufficient sensitivity or are expensive and require patient sedation. This project aims to develop a new set of tools to assist physicians in detecting cancerous lesions using CT colonography, a new screening technique that is fast and painless for the patient. The tools are based on the concept of a computerized detection algorithm to serve as a backup reader whose primary goal is to make sure that the clinician is alerted to suspicious lesions. The detection algorithm has been designed to be fast, sensitive and specific--capable of detecting polyps that are often missed using present techniques because they are buried on folds of the colon. The tools developed under this program may also assist the clinician in subtyping lesions and will provide a powerful research tool for quantifying lesion growth over time.