Authors:
Joan M. Núñez
;
Jorge Bernal
;
Javier Sánchez
and
Fernando Vilariño
Affiliation:
Comp. Vision Center, Spain
Keyword(s):
Colonoscopy, Blood Vessel, Linear Features, Valley Detection.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications and Services
;
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Image and Video Analysis
;
Medical Image Applications
;
Segmentation and Grouping
Abstract:
This paper presents an approach to mitigate the contribution of blood vessels to the energy image used at different tasks of automatic colonoscopy image analysis. This goal is achieved by introducing a characterization of endoluminal scene objects which allows us to differentiate between the trace of 2-dimensional visual objects, such as vessels, and shades from 3-dimensional visual objects, such as folds. The proposed characterization is based on the influence that the object shape has in the resulting visual feature, and it leads to the development of a blood vessel attenuation algorithm. A database consisting of manually labelled masks was built in order to test the performance of our method, which shows an encouraging success in blood vessel mitigation while keeping other structures intact. Moreover, by extending our method to the only available polyp localization algorithm tested on a public database, blood vessel mitigation proved to have a positive influence on the overall per
formance.
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