Polyp Shape Recovery from Single Endoscope Image using Medical Suture

Polyp shapes play an important role in colorectal diagnosis. However, endoscopy images are usually composed of nonrigid objects such as a polyp. Hence, it is challenging for polyp shape recovery. It is demanded to establish a support system of the colorectal diagnosis system based on polyp shape.

Shape from Shading (SFS) is one valuable approach based on photoclinometry for polyp shape recovery. SFS and endoscope image are compatible on the first sight, but there are constraints for applying SFS to endoscope image. Those approaches need some parameters like a depth from the endoscope lens to the surface, and surface reflectance factor . Furthermore, those approaches assume the whole surface which has the same value of for the Lambertian surface.

This paper contributes to mitigating constraint for applying SFS to the endoscope image based on a cue from the medical structure. An extracted medical suture is used to estimate parameters, and a method of polyp shape recovery method is proposed using both geometric and photometric constraint equations. Notably, the proposed method realizes polyp shape recovery from a single endoscope image.

From experiments it was confirmed that the approximate polyp model shape was recovered and the proposed method recovered absolute size and shape of polyp using medical suture information and obtained parameters from a single endoscope image.

This paper proposed a polyp shape recovery method which mitigated the constraint for applying SFS to the endoscope image using the medical suture. Notably, the proposed method realized polyp shape recovery from a single endoscope image without generating uniform Lambertian reflectance.