A semantic feature enhanced YOLOv5-based network for polyp detection from colonoscopy images

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a common digestive system tumor with high morbidity and mortality worldwide. At present, the use of computer-assisted colonoscopy technology to detect polyps is relatively mature, but it still faces some challenges, such as missed or false detection of polyps. Therefore, how to improve the detection rate of polyps more accurately is the key to colonoscopy. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an improved YOLOv5-based cancer polyp detection method for colorectal cancer. The method is designed with a new structure called P-C3 incorporated into the backbone and neck network of the model to enhance the expression of features. In addition, a contextual feature augmentation module was introduced to the bottom of the backbone network to increase the receptive field for multi-scale feature information and to focus on polyp features by coordinate attention mechanism. The experimental results show that compared with some traditional target detection algorithms, the model proposed in this paper has significant advantages for the detection accuracy of polyp, especially in the recall rate, which largely solves the problem of missed detection of polyps. This study will contribute to improve the polyp/adenoma detection rate of endoscopists in the process of colonoscopy, and also has important significance for the development of clinical work.