An improved deep learning approach and its applications on colonic polyp images detection

Abstract

Abstract Background Colonic polyps are more likely to be cancerous, especially those with large diameter, large number and atypical hyperplasia. If colonic polyps cannot be treated in early stage, they are likely to develop into colon cancer. Colonoscopy is easily limited by the operator’s experience, and factors such as inexperience and visual fatigue will directly affect the accuracy of diagnosis. Cooperating with Hunan children’s hospital, we proposed and improved a deep learning approach with global average pooling (GAP) in colonoscopy for assisted diagnosis. Our approach for assisted diagnosis in colonoscopy can prompt endoscopists to pay attention to polyps that may be ignored in real time, improve the detection rate, reduce missed diagnosis, and improve the efficiency of medical diagnosis. Methods We selected colonoscopy images from the gastrointestinal endoscopy room of Hunan children’s hospital to form the colonic polyp datasets. And we applied the image classification method based on Deep Learning to the classification of Colonic Polyps. The classic networks we used are VGGNets and ResNets. By using global average pooling, we proposed the improved approaches: VGGNets-GAP and ResNets-GAP. Results The accuracies of all models in datasets exceed 98%. The TPR and TNR are above 96 and 98% respectively. In addition, VGGNets-GAP networks not only have high classification accuracies, but also have much fewer parameters than those of VGGNets. Conclusions The experimental results show that the proposed approach has good effect on the automatic detection of colonic polyps. The innovations of our method are in two aspects: (1) the detection accuracy of colonic polyps has been improved. (2) our approach reduces the memory consumption and makes the model lightweight. Compared with the original VGG networks, the parameters of our VGG19-GAP networks are greatly reduced.