Endoscopy artifact detection (EAD 2019) challenge dataset

Endoscopic artifacts are a core challenge in facilitating the diagnosis and treatment of diseases in hollow organs. Precise detection of specific artifacts like pixel saturations, motion blur, specular reflections, bubbles and debris is essential for high-quality frame restoration and is crucial for realizing reliable computer-assisted tools for improved patient care. At present most videos in endoscopy are currently not analyzed due to the abundant presence of multi-class artifacts in video frames. Through the endoscopic artifact detection (EAD 2019) challenge, we address this key bottleneck problem by solving the accurate identification and localization of endoscopic frame artifacts to enable further key quantitative analysis of unusable video frames such as mosaicking and 3D reconstruction which is crucial for delivering improved patient care. This paper summarizes the challenge tasks and describes the dataset and evaluation criteria established in the EAD 2019 challenge.

A deep learning framework for quality assessment and restoration in video endoscopy

Endoscopy is a routine imaging technique used for both diagnosis and minimally invasive surgical treatment. Artifacts such as motion blur, bubbles, specular reflections, floating objects and pixel saturation impede the visual interpretation and the automated analysis of endoscopy videos. Given the widespread use of endoscopy in different clinical applications, we contend that the robust and reliable identification of such artifacts and the automated restoration of corrupted video frames is a fundamental medical imaging problem. Existing state-of-the-art methods only deal with the detection and restoration of selected artifacts. However, typically endoscopy videos contain numerous artifacts which motivates to establish a comprehensive solution. We propose a fully automatic framework that can: 1) detect and classify six different primary artifacts, 2) provide a quality score for each frame and 3) restore mildly corrupted frames. To detect different artifacts our framework exploits fast multi-scale, single stage convolutional neural network detector. We introduce a quality metric to assess frame quality and predict image restoration success. Generative adversarial networks with carefully chosen regularization are finally used to restore corrupted frames. Our detector yields the highest mean average precision (mAP at 5% threshold) of 49.0 and the lowest computational time of 88 ms allowing for accurate real-time processing. Our restoration models for blind deblurring, saturation correction and inpainting demonstrate significant improvements over previous methods. On a set of 10 test videos we show that our approach preserves an average of 68.7% which is 25% more frames than that retained from the raw videos.

Improving Whole Slide Segmentation Through Visual Context - A Systematic Study

While challenging, the dense segmentation of histology images is a necessary first step to assess changes in tissue architecture and cellular morphology. Although specific convolutional neural network architectures have been applied with great success to the problem, few effectively incorporate visual context information from multiple scales. With this paper, we present a systematic comparison of different architectures to assess how including multi-scale information affects segmentation performance. A publicly available breast cancer and a locally collected prostate cancer datasets are being utilised for this study. The results support our hypothesis that visual context and scale play a crucial role in histology image classification problems.