Automatic teniae coli detection for computed tomography colonography

Human colon has complex structures since it turns, twists, and even mobiles when the position of patient changes. The awareness of the locations and orientations is very important for improving the experience of virtual navigation, registration of supine/prone images and polyp matching. Teniae coli (TCs) are three longitudinal muscles along the human colon. They are parts of the colon wall, and they have the potential to serve as reliable landmarks to provide the above mentioned awareness. Morphologically, TCs are three smooth narrow bands, approximately perpendicular to the haustral folds, and extending between the fold pairs in a parallel manner. Such characteristics make the TCs detectable if the folds have been extracted already. In this study, based on the previous work of the segmentation of haustral folds, we introduce a new method of automatically detecting the three TCs. The experiments will be conducted on real patient studies to demonstrate the feasibility of the method, and solid evaluation will be conducted based on a flattened two-dimensional (2D) colon representation.