Active Contours for localizing polyps in colonoscopic NBI image data

Colon cancer is the third most common type of cancer in the United States of America. Every year about 140,000 people are newly diagnosed with colon cancer. Early detection is crucial for a successful therapy. The standard screening procedure is called colonoscopy. Using this endoscopic examination physicians can find colon polyps and remove them if necessary. Adenomatous colon polyps are deemed a preliminary stage of colon cancer. The removal of a polyp, though, can lead to complications like severe bleedings or colon perforation. Thus, only polyps diagnosed as adenomatous should be removed. To decide whether a polyp is adenomatous the polyp's surface structure including vascular patterns has to be inspected. Narrow-Band imaging (NBI) is a new tool to improve visibility of vascular patterns of the polyps. The first step for an automatic polyp classification system is the localization of the polyp. We investigate active contours for the localization of colon polyps in NBI image data. The shape of polyps, though roughly approximated by an elliptic form, is highly variable. Active contours offer the flexibility to adapt to polyp variation well. To avoid clustering of contour polygon points we propose the application of active rays. The quality of the results was evaluated based on manually segmented polyps as ground truth data. The results were compared to a template matching approach and to the Generalized Hough Transform. Active contours are superior to the Hough transform and perform equally well as the template matching approach.