Polyp detection inside the capsule endoscopy: an approach for power consumption reduction

TL;DR

This paper presents a hardware-efficient polyp detection system within capsule endoscopy to reduce power consumption by transmitting only informative frames, thus addressing battery limitations.

Contribution

A novel, hardware-friendly polyp detection algorithm using contrast and edge features that reduces data transmission and power usage in capsule endoscopy.

Findings

Acceptable polyp detection rate achieved

Significant reduction in data transmission

Power consumption decreased by transmitting only informative frames

Abstract

Capsule endoscopy is a novel and non-invasive method for diagnosis, which assists gastroenterologists to monitor the digestive track. Although this new technology has many advantages over the conventional endoscopy, there are weaknesses that limits the usage of this technology. Some weaknesses are due to using small-size batteries. Radio transmitter consumes the largest portion of energy; consequently, a simple way to reduce the power consumption is to reduce the data to be transmitted. Many works are proposed to reduce the amount of data to be transmitted consist of specific compression methods and reduction in video resolution and frame rate. We proposed a system inside the capsule for detecting informative frames and sending these frames instead of several non-informative frames. In this work, we specifically focused on hardware friendly algorithm (with capability of parallelism and pipeline) for implementation of polyp detection. Two features of positive contrast and customized edges of polyps are exploited to define whether the frame consists of polyp or not. The proposed method is devoid of complex and iterative structure to save power and reduce the response time. Experimental results indicate acceptable rate of detection of our work.