Automatic detection of early esophageal cancer with CNNS using transfer learning

The incidence of Esophageal Adenocarcinoma (EAC), a form of esophageal cancer, has rapidly increased in recent years. Dysplastic tissue can be removed endoscopically at an early stage, and since survival chances of patients are limited at later stages of the disease, early detection is of key impor- tance. Recently, several CAD systems for HD endoscopic images have been proposed, but these are computationally expensive, making them unfit for clinical use requiring real- time analysis. In this paper, we present a novel approach for early esophageal cancer detection using Transfer Learning with CNNs. Given the small amount of annotated data, CNN Codes are applied, where intermediate layers of the net- work are used as features for conventional classifiers. Various classifiers are combined with four of the most widely-used networks. Additionally, sliding windows are used to obtain a coarse-grained annotation indicating any possible cancerous regions. This approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art with a frame-based AUC of 0.92, while allowing both near real-time prediction and annotation at 2 fps, in a MATLAB-based framework.