Potential of hybrid adaptive filtering in inflammatory lesion detection from capsule endoscopy images

A new feature extraction technique for the detection of lesions created from mucosal inflammations in Crohn's disease, based on wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) images processing is presented here. More specifically, a novel filtering process, namely Hybrid Adaptive Filtering (HAF), was developed for efficient extraction of lesion-related structural/textural characteristics from WCE images, by employing Genetic Algorithms to the Curvelet-based representation of images. Additionally, Differential Lacunarity (DLac) analysis was applied for feature extraction from the HAF-filtered images. The resulted scheme, namely HAF-DLac, incorporates support vector machines for robust lesion recognition performance. For the training and testing of HAF-DLac, an 800-image database was used, acquired from 13 patients who undertook WCE examinations, where the abnormal cases were grouped into mild and severe, according to the severity of the depicted lesion, for a more extensive evaluation of the performance. Experimental results, along with comparison with other related efforts, have shown that the HAF-DLac approach evidently outperforms them in the field of WCE image analysis for automated lesion detection, providing higher classification results, up to 93.8% (accuracy), 95.2% (sensitivity), 92.4% (specificity) and 92.6% (precision). The promising performance of HAF-DLac paves the way for a complete computer-aided diagnosis system that could support physicians' clinical practice.