A New Color Coding Scheme for Easy Polyp Visualization in CT-Based Virtual Colonoscopy

In this paper, we first introduce three different geometric features including shape index, curvedness and sphericity ratio, for colonic polyp detection. A new color coding scheme is designed to highlight the detected polyps, and help radiologists to distinguish them from other tissues more easily. The key idea is to place the detected polyp candidates at the same locations in a newly created polygonal dataset with exactly the same topological and geometrical properties as the triangulated mesh surface of real colon dataset, and assign different colors to the two separated datasets to highlight the polyps. Finally, we validate the proposed polyp detection framework and color coding scheme by computer simulated and real colon datasets. For sixteen synthetic polyps with different shapes and different sizes, the sensitivity is 100%, and false positive is 0. Keywords: Colorectal cancer, Curvature-based geometric features, Virtual colonoscopy, Color coding, Topological and geometrical propert