Deep learning and handcrafted feature based approaches for automatic detection of angiectasia

Angiectasia, formerly called angiodysplasia, is one of the most frequent vascular lesions and often the cause of gastrointestinal bleedings. Medical specialists assessing videos or images of examinations reach a detection performance of 16% for the detection of bleeding to 69% for the detection of angiectasia [1]. This shows that automatic detection to support medical experts can be useful. In this paper, we present several machine learning-based approaches for angiectasia detection in wireless video capsule endoscopy frames. In summary, the most promising results for pixel-wise localization and frame-wise detection are obtained by the proposed deep learning method using generative adversarial networks (GANs). Using this approach, we achieve a sensitivity of 88% and specificity of 99.9% for pixel-wise localization, and a sensitivity of 98% and a specificity of 100% for frame-wise detection. Thus, the results demonstrate the capability of using deep learning for automatic angiectasia detection in real clinical settings.