CAD for polyp detection: An invaluable tool to meet the increasing need for colon-cancer screening

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer in both men and women and it was estimated that in 2003 nearly 150,000 cases would be diagnosed and 57,000 people would die. Screening has been accepted as a means for early detection of the disease, yet only a portion of the eligible population undergoes colorectal cancer screening, partially due to comfort issues of undergoing a full colonoscopic examination. Virtual colonoscopy (VC) has been demonstrated to be an effective means of performing screening and given the number of people who are candidate for screening better tools, such as Computer Aided Detection (CAD), are required to fulfill this increasing need. The developed CAD system, presented in this paper, has focused on the detection of polyps of sizes up to and including 20 mm. The results have demonstrated that: the developed algorithm generalizes, the sensitivity and specificity for middle- to large-sized polyps is on the average 95% while the overall sensitivity is roughly 88% and the false positive has remained at a manageable 4 per volume.