Real time anatomical landmarks and abnormalities detection in gastrointestinal tract

Abstract

Gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy is an active research field due to the lethal cancer diseases in the GI tract. Cancer treatments result better if diagnosed early and it increases the survival chances. There is a high miss rate in the detection of the abnormalities in the GI tract during endoscopy or colonoscopy due to the lack of attentiveness, tiring procedures, or the lack of required training. The procedure of the detection can be automated to the reduction of the risks by identifying and flagging the suspicious frames. A suspicious frame may have some of the abnormality or the information about anatomical landmark in the frame. The frame then can be analysed for the anatomical landmarks and the abnormalities for the detection of disease. In this research, a real-time endoscopic abnormalities detection system is presented that detects the abnormalities and the landmarks. The proposed system is based on a combination of handcrafted and deep features. Deep features are extracted from lightweight MobileNet convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture. There are some of the classes with a small inter-class difference and a higher intra-class differences, for such classes the same detection threshold is unable to distinguish. The threshold of such classes is learned from the training data using genetic algorithm. The system is evaluated on various benchmark datasets and resulted in an accuracy of 0.99 with the F1-score of 0.91 and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.91 on Kvasir datasets and F1-score of 0.93 on the dataset of DowPK. The system detects abnormalities in real-time with the detection speed of 41 frames per second.