[en] Computed tomographic colonography (CTC), also known as virtual colonoscopy, is a CT examination of the colon for colorectal neoplasms. Recent large-scale clinical trials have demonstrated that CTC yields sensitivity comparable to optical colonoscopy in the detection of clinically significant polyps in a screening population, making CTC a promising technique for screening of colon cancer. For CTC to be a clinically practical means of screening, it must reliably and consistently detect polyps with high accuracy. However, high-level expertise is required to interpret the resulting CT images to find polyps, resulting in variable diagnostic accuracy among radiologists in the detection of polyps. A key technology to overcome this problem and to bring CTC to prime time for screening of colorectal cancer is computer-aided detection (CAD) of polyps. CAD automatically detects the locations of suspicious polyps in CTC images and presents them to radiologists. CAD has the potential to increase diagnostic performance in the detection of polyps as well as to reduce variability of the diagnostic accuracy among radiologists. This paper presents an evidence-based investigation of the influence of CAD on screening of colon cancer with CTC by describing the benefits of using CAD in the diagnosis of CTC, the fundamental CAD scheme for the detection of polyps in CTC, its detection performance, the effect on the improvement of detection performance, as well as the current and future challenges in CAD. (author)