Towards Polyp Counting In Full-Procedure Colonoscopy Videos

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new framework for automatic polyp counting in full colonoscopy videos, leveraging a novel dataset and improved clustering methods to enhance accuracy and reliability.

Contribution

It provides the first open-access dataset and tasks for polyp counting, and proposes an affinity propagation clustering approach to improve polyp re-identification and counting accuracy.

Findings

Achieved a polyp fragmentation rate of 6.30

False positive rate below 5% on REAL-Colon dataset

State-of-the-art performance in polyp counting

Abstract

Automated colonoscopy reporting holds great potential for enhancing quality control and improving cost-effectiveness of colonoscopy procedures. A major challenge lies in the automated identification, tracking, and re-association (ReID) of polyps tracklets across full-procedure colonoscopy videos. This is essential for precise polyp counting and enables automated computation of key quality metrics, such as Adenoma Detection Rate (ADR) and Polyps Per Colonoscopy (PPC). However, polyp ReID is challenging due to variations in polyp appearance, frequent disappearance from the field of view, and occlusions. In this work, we leverage the REAL-Colon dataset, the first open-access dataset providing full-procedure videos, to define tasks, data splits and metrics for the problem of automatically count polyps in full-procedure videos, establishing an open-access framework. We re-implement previously proposed SimCLR-based methods for learning representations of polyp tracklets, both single-frame and multi-view, and adapt them to the polyp counting task. We then propose an Affinity Propagation-based clustering method to further improve ReID based on these learned representations, ultimately enhancing polyp counting. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a polyp fragmentation rate of 6.30 and a false positive rate (FPR) below 5% on the REAL-Colon dataset. We release code at https://github.com/lparolari/towards-polyp-counting.