A curvelet-based lacunarity approach for ulcer detection from Wireless Capsule Endoscopy images

Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) is a fairly new technology that offers a low-risk, non invasive visual inspection of the patient's digestive tract, especially the small bowel, that was previously unreachable using the traditional endoscopic methods. However, the large amount of images produced by WCE requires a highly trained physician to manually inspect them; a procedure that is time consuming and prone to human error. This was the rationale to propose a novel strategy for automatic detection of WCE images related to ulcer, one of the most common findings of the digestive tract. This paper introduces a new texture extraction method based on the Discrete Curvelet Transform (DCT), a recent multi-resolution analysis tool. Textural information is acquired by calculating the lacunarity index of DCT subbands of the WCE images. The classification step is performed by a Support Vector Machine (SVM), demonstrating promising classification accuracy (86.5%) and pointing towards further research in this field.