Endomicroscopic image retrieval and classification using invariant visual features

International audienceThis paper investigates the use of modern content based image retrieval methods to classify endomicroscopic images into two categories: neoplastic (pathological) and benign. We describe first the method that maps an image into a visual feature signature which is a numerical vector invariant with respect to some particular classes of geometric and intensity transformations. Then we explain how these signatures are used to retrieve from a database the k closest images to a new image. The classification is finally achieved through a procedure of votes weighted by a proximity criterion (weighted k-nearest neighbors). Compared with several previously published alternatives whose maximal accuracy rate is almost 67 % on the database, our approach yields an accuracy of 80 % and offers promising perspectives

Introducing space and time in local feature-based endomicroscopic image retrieval

International audienceInterpreting endomicroscopic images is still a significant challenge, especially since one single still image may not always contain enough information to make a robust diagnosis. To aid the physicians, we investigated some local feature-based retrieval methods that provide, given a query image, similar annotated images from a database of endomicroscopic images combined with high-level diagnosis represented as textual information. Local feature-based methods may be limited by the small field of view (FOV) of endomicroscopy and the fact that they do not take into account the spatial relationship between the local features, and the time relationship between successive images of the video sequences. To extract discriminative information over the entire image field, our proposed method collects local features in a dense manner instead of using a standard salient region detector. After the retrieval process, we introduce a verification step driven by the textual information in the database and in which spatial relationship between the local features is used. A spatial criterion is built from the co-occurence matrix of local features and used to remove outliers by thresholding on this criterion. To overcome the small-FOV problem and take advantage of the video sequence, we propose to combine image retrieval and mosaicing. Mosaicing essentially projects the temporal dimension onto a large field of view image. In this framework, videos, represented by mosaics, and single images can be retrieved with the same tools. With a leave-n-out cross-validation, our results show that taking into account the spatial relationship between local features and the temporal information of endomicroscopic videos by image mosaicing improves the retrieval accuracy

An image retrieval approach to setup difficulty levels in training systems for endomicroscopy diagnosis

International audienceLearning medical image interpretation is an evolutive process that requires modular training systems, from non-expert to expert users. Our study aims at developing such a system for endomicroscopy diagnosis. It uses a difficulty predictor to try and shorten the physician learning curve. As the understanding of video diagnosis is driven by visual similarities, we propose a content-based video retrieval approach to estimate the level of interpretation difficulty. The performance of our retrieval method is compared with several state of the art methods, and its genericity is demonstrated with two different clinical databases, on the Barrett's Esophagus and on colonic polyps. From our retrieval results, we learn a difficulty predictor against a ground truth given by the percentage of false diagnoses among several physicians. Our experiments show that, although our datasets are not large enough to test for statistical significance, there is a noticeable relationship between our retrieval-based difficulty estimation and the difficulty experienced by the physicians

Predicting Pathology in Medical Decision Support Systems in Endoscopy of the Gastrointestinal Tract

Since medical endoscopy is a minimally invasive and relatively painless procedure, allowing to inspect the inner cavities of the human body, endoscopes play an important role in modern medicine. In medica

Content-Based Retrieval in Endomicroscopy: Toward an Efficient Smart Atlas for Clinical Diagnosis

International audienceIn this paper we present the first Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) framework in the field of in vivo endomicroscopy, with applications ranging from training support to diagnosis support. We propose to adjust the standard Bag-of-Visual-Words method for the retrieval of endomicroscopic videos. Retrieval performance is evaluated both indirectly from a classification point-of-view, and directly with respect to a perceived similarity ground truth. The proposed method significantly outperforms, on two different endomicroscopy databases, several state-of-the-art methods in CBIR. With the aim of building a self-training simulator, we use retrieval results to estimate the interpretation difficulty experienced by the endoscopists. Finally, by incorporating clinical knowledge about perceived similarity and endomicroscopy semantics, we are able: 1) to learn an adequate visual similarity distance and 2) to build visual-word-based semantic signatures that extract, from low-level visual features, a higher-level clinical knowledge expressed in the endoscopist own language

Semantic segmentation of non-linear multimodal images for disease grading of inflammatory bowel disease: A segnet-based application

Non-linear multimodal imaging, the combination of coherent anti-stokes Raman scattering (CARS), two-photon excited fluorescence (TPEF) and second harmonic generation (SHG), has shown its potential to assist the diagnosis of different inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs). This label-free imaging technique can support the ‘gold-standard’ techniques such as colonoscopy and histopathology to ensure an IBD diagnosis in clinical environment. Moreover, non-linear multimodal imaging can measure biomolecular changes in different tissue regions such as crypt and mucosa region, which serve as a predictive marker for IBD severity. To achieve a real-time assessment of IBD severity, an automatic segmentation of the crypt and mucosa regions is needed. In this paper, we semantically segment the crypt and mucosa region using a deep neural network. We utilized the SegNet architecture (Badrinarayanan et al., 2015) and compared its results with a classical machine learning approach. Our trained SegNet mod el achieved an overall F1 score of 0.75. This model outperformed the classical machine learning approach for the segmentation of the crypt and mucosa region in our study

Vision-based retargeting for endoscopic navigation

Endoscopy is a standard procedure for visualising the human gastrointestinal tract. With the advances in biophotonics, imaging techniques such as narrow band imaging, confocal laser endomicroscopy, and optical coherence tomography can be combined with normal endoscopy for assisting the early diagnosis of diseases, such as cancer. In the past decade, optical biopsy has emerged to be an effective tool for tissue analysis, allowing in vivo and in situ assessment of pathological sites with real-time feature-enhanced microscopic images. However, the non-invasive nature of optical biopsy leads to an intra-examination retargeting problem, which is associated with the difficulty of re-localising a biopsied site consistently throughout the whole examination. In addition to intra-examination retargeting, retargeting of a pathological site is even more challenging across examinations, due to tissue deformation and changing tissue morphologies and appearances. The purpose of this thesis is to address both the intra- and inter-examination retargeting problems associated with optical biopsy. We propose a novel vision-based framework for intra-examination retargeting. The proposed framework is based on combining visual tracking and detection with online learning of the appearance of the biopsied site. Furthermore, a novel cascaded detection approach based on random forests and structured support vector machines is developed to achieve efficient retargeting. To cater for reliable inter-examination retargeting, the solution provided in this thesis is achieved by solving an image retrieval problem, for which an online scene association approach is proposed to summarise an endoscopic video collected in the first examination into distinctive scenes. A hashing-based approach is then used to learn the intrinsic representations of these scenes, such that retargeting can be achieved in subsequent examinations by retrieving the relevant images using the learnt representations. For performance evaluation of the proposed frameworks, extensive phantom, ex vivo and in vivo experiments have been conducted, with results demonstrating the robustness and potential clinical values of the methods proposed.Open Acces