Vocal cord anomaly detection based on Local Fine-Grained Contour Features

Abstract

Laryngoscopy is a popular examination for vocal cord disease diagnosis. The conventional screening of laryngoscopic images is labor-intensive and depends heavily on the experience of the medical specialists. Automatic detection of vocal cord diseases from laryngoscopic images is highly sought to assist regular image reading. In laryngoscopic images, the symptoms of vocal cord diseases are concentrated in the inner vocal cord contour, which is often characterized as vegetation and small protuberances. The existing classification methods pay little, if any, attention to the role of vocal cord contour in the diagnosis of vocal cord diseases and fail to effectively capture the fine-grained features. In this paper, we propose a novel Local Fine-grained Contour Feature extraction method for vocal cord anomaly detection. Our proposed method consists of four stages: image segmentation to obtain the overall vocal cord contour, inner vocal cord contour isolation to obtain the inner contour curve by comparing the changes of adjacent pixel values, extraction of the latent feature in the inner vocal cord contour by taking the tangent inclination angle of each point on the contour as the latent feature, and the classification module. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves the detection performance of vocal cord anomaly and achieves an accuracy of 97.21%.