Automated Detection and Diagnosis of Crohn's Disease in CT Enterography

摘要

Crohn's disease is an inflammatory bowel disease that has a variety of symptoms and that is increasing in prevalence. There is a need for diagnostic tools that would provide objective and reproducible measurements for guiding therapy. We developed a computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) scheme for diagnosing mural enhancement and for detecting small-bowel obstructions of Crohn's disease in computed tomographic enterography (CTE). The scheme was evaluated on 69 patients. The values of quantitative features calculated by CAD were significantly different in the case of Crohn's disease than in normal patients. The per-patient detection sensitivity for obstructions was 93%. The results indicate that CAD can be used to provide radiologists with reliable automated quantitative interpretation of CTE data.