Feature selection and classification of ulcerated lesions using statistical analysis for WCE images

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a technology developed to inspect the whole gastrointestinal tract (especially the small bowel area that is unreachable using the traditional endoscopy procedure) for various abnormalities in a non-invasive manner. However, visualization of a massive number of images is a very time-consuming and tedious task for physicians (prone to human error). Thus, an automatic scheme for lesion detection in WCE videos is a potential solution to alleviate this problem. In this work, a novel statistical approach was chosen for differentiating ulcer and non-ulcer pixels using various color spaces (or more specifically using relevant color bands). The chosen feature vector was used to compute the performance metrics using SVM with grid search method for maximum efficiency. The experimental results and analysis showed that the proposed algorithm was robust in detecting ulcers. The performance in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are 97.89, 96.22, and 95.09, respectively, which is promising. © 2017 by the authors.