TriZ-a rotation-tolerant image feature and its application in endoscope-based disease diagnosis

Endoscopy is becoming one of the widely-used technologies to screen the gastric diseases, and it heavily relies on the experiences of the clinical endoscopists. The location, shape, and size are the typical patterns for the endoscopists to make the diagnosis decisions. The contrasting texture patterns also suggest the potential lesions. This study designed a novel rotation-tolerant image feature, TriZ, and demonstrated the effectiveness on both the rotation invariance and the lesion detection of three gastric lesion types, i.e., gastric polyp, gastric ulcer, and gastritis. TriZ achieved 87.0% in the four-class classification problem of the three gastric lesion types and the healthy controls, averaged over the twenty random runs of 10-fold cross-validations. Due to that biomedical imaging technologies may capture the lesion sites from different angles, the symmetric image feature extraction algorithm TriZ may facilitate the biomedical image based disease diagnosis modeling. Compared with the 378,434 features of the HOG algorithm, TriZ achieved a better accuracy using only 126 image features.