Mucosal imaging advanced technologies in the gastrointestinal tract

Computer assisted gastric abnormalities detection using hybrid texture descriptors for chromoendoscopy images

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

The early diagnosis of stomach cancer can be performed by using a proper screening procedure. Chromoendoscopy (CH) is an image-enhanced video endoscopy technique, which is used for inspection of the gastrointestinal-tract by spraying dyes to highlight the gastric mucosal structures. An endoscopy session can end up with generating a large number of video frames. Therefore, inspection of every individual endoscopic-frame is an exhaustive task for the medical experts. In contrast with manual inspection, the automated analysis of gastroenterology images using computer vision based techniques can provide assistance to endoscopist, by finding out abnormal frames from the whole endoscopic sequence.

METHODS

In this paper, we have presented a new feature extraction method named as Gabor-based gray-level co-occurrence matrix (G2LCM) for computer-aided detection of CH abnormal frames. It is a hybrid texture extraction approach which extracts a combination both local and global texture descriptors. Moreover, texture information of a CH image is represented by computing the gray level co-occurrence matrix of Gabor filters responses. Furthermore, the second-order statistics of these co-occurrence matrices are computed to represent images' texture.

RESULTS

The obtained results show the possibility to correctly classifying abnormal from normal frames, with sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and area under the curve as 91%, 82%, 87% and 0.91 respectively, by using a support vector machine classifier and G2LCM texture features.

CONCLUSION

It is apparent from results that the proposed system can be used for providing aid to the gastroenterologist in the screening of the gastric tract. Ultimately, the time taken by an endoscopic procedure will be sufficiently reduced.