Efficient feature selection for polyp detection

Abstract

Computed tomographic colonography (CTC) is a promising alternative to traditional invasive colonoscopic methods used in the detection and removal of cancerous growths, or polyps in the colon. Existing algorithms for CTC typically use a classifier to discriminate between true and false positives generated by a polyp candidate detection system. However, these classifiers often suffer from a phenomenon termed the curse of dimensionality, whereby there is a marked degradation in the performance of a classifier as the number of features used in the classifier is increased. In addition an increase in the number of features used also contributes to an increase in computational complexity and demand..