Supportive automatic annotation of early esophageal cancer using local gabor and color features

Over the past years High Definition (HD) endoscopy has become a crucial tool for the early detection of esophageal cancer. The high resolution offers specialist physicians high-quality visual information, enabling them to identify dysplastic tissue leading to Early Adenocarcinoma (EAC). The detection and removal of these early types of cancer drastically increases the survival chances of the patient. However, even for an experienced specialist it remains an arduous task to identify the patterns associated with early cancer. Therefore, a computer-aided detection system that supports the physician seems highly attractive. We present a novel algorithm for automatic detection of early cancerous tissue in HD endoscopic images. The algorithm computes local color- and texture features based on the original and on the Gabor-filtered image. We explore the spectral characteristics of the image regions that contain early cancer and we design appropriate filters based on this analysis. The features are classified by a trained Support Vector Machine (SVM) after which additional post-processing techniques are applied in order to annotate the image region containing early cancer. For 7 patients, we compare 32 annotations made by the algorithm with the corresponding delineations made by an expert gastroenterologist. Of 38 lesions indicated independently by the gastroenterologist, the system detects 36 of those lesions with a recall of 0.95 and a precision of 0.75.