Keyframe Selection from Colonoscopy Videos to Enhance Visualization for Polyp Detection

Colonoscopy video acquisition and recording have been increasingly performed for comprehensive diagnosis and retrospective analysis of colorectal cancer (CRC). Reviewing video streams helps detect and inspect polyps, the precursor to CRC. However, visualizing these streams in their raw form puts a considerable burden on clinicians as most of the frames are clinically insignificant and are not useful for pathological interpretation. For improved visualization of diagnostically significant information, we have proposed an automated framework that discards the uninformative frames from raw videos. Our approach initially extracts high-quality colonoscopy frames using a deep learning model to assist clinicians in visualizing data in a refined form. Subsequently, our work validates the effectiveness of keyframe selection by employing polyp detection models. All the evaluations are performed either patient-wise or cross-dataset to suffice the real-time requirements. Experimental results show that the keyframe extraction saves reviewing time and enhances the detection performances. The proposed approach achieves a polyp detection F1-score of 79.78% (patient-wise) and 89.22% (cross-dataset) on the SUN and CVC-VideoClinicDB databases, respectively.