3D Representation of the Digestive Tract Surface in Wireless Capsule Endoscopy Videos

Abstract

Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) is an endoscopy technology that allows medical personnel to view the digestive tract non-invasively. Physicians can detect diseases such as blood-based abnormalities, polyps, ulcers and Crohn’s disease. In previous papers we have proposed methodologies that deal with such abnormalities. In the current paper we are proposing a novel approach to visualize the digestive tract surface in the three-dimensional (3D) space using images (2D) of WCE videos. Current capsule technology has a low video frame rate (3 frames/second) and therefore a 3D reconstruction of the digestive tract lacks of detailed coherence. Since such a 3D reconstruction is unfeasible we focused our research on extracting and representing the texture of the surface of the digestive tract in 3D and not the digestive tract itself. The use of this technique has been well appreciated by our collaborating physicians for giving them the ability to view the WCE videos in a new different way. To our knowledge no similar research has been performed on WCE videos. Illustrative results from the methodology are also given in this paper.