Automatic lesion detection in wireless capsule endoscopy — A simple solution for a complex problem

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is performed with a swallowable miniature optical endoscope which transmits color images wirelessly during its journey in the gastrointestinal tract. In this paper we present a computationally efficient and effective approach to cope with automatic detection of possible abnormalities in the WCE videos and consequently with the reduction of the time required for the WCE inspection. It involves automatic detection of salient points based on color information and supervised classification of simple color vectors extracted from the neighborhood of each point. The experiments performed aim to determine the optimal color space components for feature extraction, and identification of abnormalities. Main advantages of this approach are its computational efficiency, its sensitivity to detect small lesions, and its generality. The results obtained from experimentation with a dataset with various types of abnormalities and non-ideal normal frames, approximate 0.9 in terms of the area under receiver operating characteristic (ROC).