Abstract: Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a device that allows the direct visualization of gastrointestinal tract with minimal discomfort for the patient, but at the price of a large amount of time for screening. In order to reduce this time, several works have proposed to automatically remove all the frames showing intestinal content. These methods label frames as {intestinal content – clear} without discriminating between types of content (with different physiological meaning) or the portion of image covered. In addition, since the presence of intestinal content has been identified as an indicator of intestinal motility, its accurate quantification can show a potential clinical relevance. In this paper, we present a method for the robust detection and segmentation of intestinal content in WCE images, together with its further discrimination between turbid liquid and bubbles. Our proposal is based on a twofold system. First, frames presenting intestinal content are detected by a support vector machine classifier using color and textural information. Second, intestinal content frames are segmented into {turbid, bubbles, and clear} regions. We show a detailed validation using a large dataset. Our system outperforms previous methods and, for the first time, discriminates between turbid from bubbles media.

Abstract: This paper presents an approach to mitigate the contribution of blood vessels to the energy image used at different tasks of automatic colonoscopy image analysis. This goal is achieved by introducing a characterization of endoluminal scene objects which allows us to differentiate between the trace of 2-dimensional visual objects,such as vessels, and shades from 3-dimensional visual objects, such as folds. The proposed characterization is based on the influence that the object shape has in the resulting visual feature, and it leads to the development of a blood vessel attenuation algorithm. A database consisting of manually labelled masks was built in order to test the performance of our method, which shows an encouraging success in blood vessel mitigation while keeping other structures intact. Moreover, by extending our method to the only available polyp localization
algorithm tested on a public database, blood vessel mitigation proved to have a positive influence on the overall performance.

Abstract: This work tackles the categorization of general linear radial patterns by means of the valleys and ridges detection and the use of descriptors of directional information, which are provided by steerable filters in different regions of the image. We successfully apply our proposal in the specific case of automatic detection of tonic contractions in video capsule endoscopy, which represent a paradigmatic example of linear radial patterns.

Abstract: In this paper we present our approach on real-time polyp detection in colonoscopy videos. Our method consists of three stages: Image Segmentation, Region Description and Image Classification. Taking into account the constraints of our project, we introduce our segmentation system that is based on the model of appearance of the polyp that we have defined after observing real videos from colonoscopy processes. The output of this stage will ideally be a low number of regions of which one of them should cover the whole polyp region (if there is one in the image). This regions will be described in terms of features and, as a result of a machine learning schema, classified based on the values that they have for the several features that we will use on their description. Although we are still on the early stages of the project, we present some preliminary segmentation results that indicates that we are going in a good direction.