Electronic colon-cleansing for CT colonography: diagnostic performance.

Background: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether an electronic-colonic-cleansing (ECC) algorithm is beneficial for the diagnostic performance compared to a CT colonography (CTC) evaluation without electronic cleansing in tagged datasets.

Methods: Two blinded readers evaluated CTC datasets from 79 patients with 153 colorectal polyps confirmed by optical colonoscopy. Cases were read in a randomized order with and without the use of electronic colon-cleansing software. Per-polyp sensitivity, per-polyp/per-patient specificity and reading times (with and without ECC) have been calculated and reported.

Results: Per-polyp sensitivity for polyps >6 mm without using ECC was 60.4% (Reader 1: 59.7%, Reader 2: 61.1%), while polyps >10 mm were detected with a sensitivity of 58.3% (Reader 1: 66.7%, Reader 2: 50%). On electronically cleansed datasets, the sensitivity was 73.6% (Reader 1: 76.4%; Reader 2: 70.8%) for polyps >6 mm and 83.3% (Reader 1: 83.3%; Reader 2: 83.3%), respectively. Per-patient specificity was 75% without using cleansing (Reader 1: 68%, Reader 2: 82%) and 81.5% using ECC (Reader 1: 86%, Reader 2: 77%).

Conclusion: Reading CTC cases using ECC software improves sensitivity in detecting clinically relevant colorectal polyps.