Contraction detection in small bowel from an image sequence of wireless capsule endoscopy

This paper describes a method for automatic detection of contractions in the small bowel through analyzing Wireless Capsule Endoscopic images. Based on the characteristics of contraction images, a coherent procedure that includes analyzes of the temporal and spatial features is proposed. For temporal features, the image sequence is examined to detect candidate contractions through the changing number of edges and an evaluation of similarities between the frames of each possible contraction to eliminate cases of low probability. For spatial features, descriptions of the directions at the edge pixels are used to determine contractions utilizing a classification method. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our method that can detect a total of 83% of cases. Thus, this is a feasible method for developing tools to assist in diagnostic procedures in the small bowel.