Background: Small intestinal vascular malformations (angiodysplasias) are common causes of small intestinal bleeding. While capsule endoscopy has become the primary diagnostic method for angiodysplasia, manual reading of the entire gastrointestinal tract is time-consuming and requires a heavy workload, which affects the accuracy of diagnosis.
Aim: To evaluate whether artificial intelligence can assist the diagnosis and increase the detection rate of angiodysplasias in the small intestine, achieve automatic disease detection, and shorten the capsule endoscopy (CE) reading time.
Methods: A convolutional neural network semantic segmentation model with a feature fusion method, which automatically recognizes the category of vascular dysplasia under CE and draws the lesion contour, thus improving the efficiency and accuracy of identifying small intestinal vascular malformation lesions, was proposed. Resnet-50 was used as the skeleton network to design the fusion mechanism, fuse the shallow and depth features, and classify the images at the pixel level to achieve the segmentation and recognition of vascular dysplasia. The training set and test set were constructed and compared with PSPNet, Deeplab3+, and UperNet.
Results: The test set constructed in the study achieved satisfactory results, where pixel accuracy was 99%, mean intersection over union was 0.69, negative predictive value was 98.74%, and positive predictive value was 94.27%. The model parameter was 46.38 M, the float calculation was 467.2 G, and the time length to segment and recognize a picture was 0.6 s.
Conclusion: Constructing a segmentation network based on deep learning to segment and recognize angiodysplasias lesions is an effective and feasible method for diagnosing angiodysplasias lesions.
Keywords: Angiodysplasias; Artificial intelligence; Capsule endoscopy; Image segmentation.
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