Automatic colonic polyp detection using multiobjective evolutionary techniques

Colonic polyps appear like elliptical protrusions on the inner wall of the colon. Curvature based features for colonic polyp detection have proved to be successful in several computer-aided diagnostic CT colonography (CTC) systems. Some simple thresholds are set for those features for creating initial polyp candidates, sophisticated classification scheme are then applied on these polyp candidates to reduce false positives. There are two objective functions, the number of missed polyps and false positive rate, that need to be minimized when setting those thresholds. These two objectives conflict and it is usually difficult to optimize them both by a gradient search. In this paper, we utilized a multiobjective evolutionary method, the Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm (SPEA2), 1 to optimize those thresholds. SPEA2 incorporates the concept of Pareto dominance and applies genetic techniques to evolve individual solutions to the Pareto front. The SPEA2 algorithm was applied to colon CT images from 27 patients each having a prone and a supine scan. There are 40 colonoscopically confirmed polyps resulting in 72 positive detections in CTC reading. The results obtained by SPEA2 were compared with those obtained by our old system, where an appropriate value was set for each of those thresholds by a histogram examination method. If we keep the sensitivity the same as that of our old system, the SPEA2 algorithm reduced false positive rate by 76.4% from average false positive 55.6 to 13.3 per data set. If the false positive rate is kept the same for both systems, SPEA2 increased the sensitivity by 13.1% from 53 to 61 among 72 ground truth detections.