COLON: The largest COlonoscopy LONg sequence public database
This dataset addresses the gap in computational tools for polyp detection in realistic colonoscopy scenarios, where polyps are rare and conditions are challenging, potentially aiding in reducing missed diagnoses for colorectal cancer patients.
The authors tackled the problem of polyp detection in colonoscopy by introducing COLON, the largest public dataset of long colonoscopy sequences, containing 30,000 polyp-labeled frames and 400,000 background frames to better simulate real clinical conditions.
Colorectal cancer is the third most aggressive cancer worldwide. Polyps, as the main biomarker of the disease, are detected, localized, and characterized through colonoscopy procedures. Nonetheless, during the examination, up to 25% of polyps are missed, because of challenging conditions (camera movements, lighting changes), and the close similarity of polyps and intestinal folds. Besides, there is a remarked subjectivity and expert dependency to observe and detect abnormal regions along the intestinal tract. Currently, publicly available polyp datasets have allowed significant advances in computational strategies dedicated to characterizing non-parametric polyp shapes. These computational strategies have achieved remarkable scores of up to 90% in segmentation tasks. Nonetheless, these strategies operate on cropped and expert-selected frames that always observe polyps. In consequence, these computational approximations are far from clinical scenarios and real applications, where colonoscopies are redundant on intestinal background with high textural variability. In fact, the polyps typically represent less than 1% of total observations in a complete colonoscopy record. This work introduces COLON: the largest COlonoscopy LONg sequence dataset with around of 30 thousand polyp labeled frames and 400 thousand background frames. The dataset was collected from a total of 30 complete colonoscopies with polyps at different stages, variations in preparation procedures, and some cases the observation of surgical instrumentation. Additionally, 10 full intestinal background video control colonoscopies were integrated in order to achieve a robust polyp-background frame differentiation. The COLON dataset is open to the scientific community to bring new scenarios to propose computational tools dedicated to polyp detection and segmentation over long sequences, being closer to real colonoscopy scenarios.