Endometrial polyps are common gynecological lesions. The standard treatment for this condition is hysteroscopic polypectomy. However, this procedure may be accompanied by misdetection of endometrial polyps. To improve the diagnostic accuracy and reduce the risk of misdetection, a deep learning model based on YOLOX is proposed to detect endometrial polyps in real time. Group normalization is employed to improve its performance with large hysteroscopic images. In addition, we propose a video adjacent-frame association algorithm to address the problem of unstable polyp detection. Our proposed model was trained on a dataset of 11,839 images from 323 cases provided by a hospital and was tested on two datasets of 431 cases from two hospitals. The results show that the lesion-based sensitivity of the model reached 100% and 92.0% for the two test sets, compared with 95.83% and 77.33%, respectively, for the original YOLOX model. This demonstrates that the improved model may be used effectively as a diagnostic tool during clinical hysteroscopic procedures to reduce the risk of missing endometrial polyps.
Keywords: YOLOX; deep learning model; endometrial polyps; hysteroscopy.