A Non-Aligned Deep Representation to Enhance Standard Colonoscopy Observations from Vascular Narrow Band Polyp Patterns.

Abstract

Colorectal cancer (CRC) was responsible during 2020 for about one million deaths worldwide. Polyps are protuberance masses, observed in routine colonoscopies, that constitute the main CRC biomarker. Nonetheless, one of the best alternatives to the polyp malignancy classification is the vascular pattern analysis, typically observed from specialized narrow-band images (NBI). Even worst, these patterns are only characterized from gastroenterologist observations, introducing subjectivity and being prone to diagnostic errors, with misclassi-fications ranging from 59.5 % to 84.2 %. This work introduces a non-aligned and bi-directional deep projection between optical colonoscopy (OC) and NBI sequences, to recover enhanced OC sequences, integrating vascular patterns, that allow better dis-crimination among adenomas, hyperplastic and serrated polyps. This self-supervised representation help with misclassification in standard OC observations. The validation was performed on a total of 76 OC and 76 NBI sequences, achieving a gain of 22.34% w.r.t descriptors computed from raw OC. Clinical relevance- A deep representation that enhances standard OC observations associating vascularity to the polyps to discriminate among adenomas hyperplastic and serrated polyps.