NeoUNet: Towards accurate colon polyp segmentation and neoplasm detection
This work addresses the challenge of classifying and segmenting polyps for endoscopists, potentially reducing missed adenoma detections and increasing efficiency in medical procedures.
The paper tackles the problem of accurate colon polyp segmentation and neoplasm detection by proposing a fine-grained formulation and a UNet-based architecture called NeoUNet, achieving highly competitive results on their benchmark dataset.
Automatic polyp segmentation has proven to be immensely helpful for endoscopy procedures, reducing the missing rate of adenoma detection for endoscopists while increasing efficiency. However, classifying a polyp as being neoplasm or not and segmenting it at the pixel level is still a challenging task for doctors to perform in a limited time. In this work, we propose a fine-grained formulation for the polyp segmentation problem. Our formulation aims to not only segment polyp regions, but also identify those at high risk of malignancy with high accuracy. In addition, we present a UNet-based neural network architecture called NeoUNet, along with a hybrid loss function to solve this problem. Experiments show highly competitive results for NeoUNet on our benchmark dataset compared to existing polyp segmentation models.