• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.251-256
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• 2011

Virtual colonoscopy is favored over conventional colonoscopy because its non-invasive procedure can avoid complications that may happen in a conventional approach and because it can cleanse colon electronically instead of uncomfortable conventional colon cleansing. Electronic Colon Cleansing(ECC) has to deal with not only removing tagged fecal material but also recovering Partial Volume Effect(PVE) due to tagging material. This paper proposes an ECC method restoring inherent natural PVE while previous approaches focused only on reducing PVE due to tagged fecal material. The proposed method reduces PVE using 3-dimensional adaptive density correction and then replaces tagged fecal material into air. Next, it generates natural PVE for the replaced air adjacent to soft tissue and finally makes smooth transition of gray values for soft tissue adjacent to the replaced air. The proposed method applied to eleven patient data, and showed promising results.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.16 no.18
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• pp.8351-8358
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• 2016

Electronic cleansing is an image post processing technique in which the tagged colonic content is subtracted from colon using CTC images. There are post processing artefacts, like: 1) soft tissue degradation; 2) incomplete cleansing; 3) misclassification of polyp due to pseudo enhanced voxels; and 4) pseudo soft tissue structures. The objective of the study was to subtract the tagged colonic content without losing the soft tissue structures. This paper proposes a novel adaptive method to solve the first three problems using a multi-step algorithm. It uses a new edge model-based method which involves colon segmentation, priori information of Hounsfield units (HU) of different colonic contents at specific tube voltages, subtracting the tagging materials, restoring the soft tissue structures based on selective HU, removing boundary between air-contrast, and applying a filter to clean minute particles due to improperly tagged endoluminal fluids which appear as noise. The main finding of the study was submerged soft tissue structures were absolutely preserved and the pseudo enhanced intensities were corrected without any artifact. The method was implemented with multithreading for parallel processing in a high performance computer. The technique was applied on a fecal tagged dataset (30 patients) where the tagging agent was not completely removed from colon. The results were then qualitatively validated by radiologists for any image processing artifacts.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.35 no.8
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• pp.493-500
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• 2008

This paper proposes an electronic colon cleansing method using a patient CT profile for a virtual colonoscopy. The proposed method extracts the colon using cubic seeded region growing, and removes tagged materials adjacent to the colon. Residuals produced by a partial volume effect at the boundary of air-tagged material are deleted, and the removed soft tissue pixels due to a partial volume effect at the boundary of tagged material-soft tissue are recovered using a patient CT profile. The proposed method was applied to 16 virtual colonoscopy patient data sets, and produced promising results by a subjective evaluation of a radiologist and by a quantitative evaluation of a computer-aided diagnosis system.