Enhancing polyp detection in endoscopy with cross-channel self-attention fusion

Abstract

Colorectal cancer (CRC) poses a significant global health challenge, ranking as a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Colonoscopy, the most effective means of preventing CRC, is utilized for early detection and removal of precancerous growths. However, while there have been many efforts that utilize deep learning based approaches for automatic polyp detection, false positive rates in polyp detection during colonoscopy remain high due to the diverse characteristics of polyps and the presence of various artifacts. This paper introduces an innovative technique aimed at improving polyp detection accuracy in colonoscopy video frames. The proposed method introduces a novel framework incorporating a cross-channel self-attention fusion unit, aimed at enhancing polyp detection accuracy in endoscopic procedures. The integration of this unit proves to play an important role in refining prediction quality, resulting in more precise detection outcomes in complex medical imaging scenarios. To substantiate the effectiveness of our framework, we create an extensive private dataset comprising complete endoscopy videos, captured from diverse equipment from different manufacturers. This dataset represents realistic and intricate application scenarios, offering an authentic and effective foundation for both training and evaluating our framework. Thorough experiments and ablation studies are conducted to assess the performance of our proposed approach. The results demonstrate that our framework, featuring key technical innovations, significantly reduces false detections and achieves a higher recall rate. This underscores the remarkable effectiveness of our framework in upgrading polyp detection accuracy in real-world endoscopy procedures.