Targeted optical biopsies for surveillance endoscopies

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Gastroenterology
• Computer Vision

Background:

• Probe-based confocal laser endomicroscopy (pCLE) enables in-vivo optical biopsies during endoscopy without tissue removal.
• The non-invasive nature of pCLE optical biopsies poses challenges for re-targeting previous sites in surveillance due to the lack of physical landmarks.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a new method for recognizing optical biopsy scenes during serial endoscopic surveillance examinations.
• To address the difficulty of re-targeting non-invasively acquired optical biopsy sites.

Main Methods:

• A novel workflow involving two-run surveillance endoscopies was proposed to reduce task ill-posedness.
• The method clusters frames from diagnostic and first-run surveillance (S1) endoscopy videos to establish scene correspondences.
• Real-time, in-vivo scene recognition is performed during the second-run surveillance (S2) based on these correspondences.

Main Results:

• The proposed approach demonstrated feasibility in recognizing optical biopsy scenes.
• Experimental results showed 89.75% recall and 80.91% precision across 3 patient datasets.
• The method facilitates accurate re-targeting of previous pCLE optical biopsy sites.

Conclusions:

• The developed scene recognition method is effective for serial endoscopic surveillance after pCLE optical biopsies.
• This technique improves the ability to revisit specific locations for monitoring, enhancing the utility of non-invasive endoscopic procedures.
• The study highlights the potential of advanced image analysis for improving the efficiency and accuracy of endoscopic surveillance.