Robot-Enabled Machine Learning-Based Diagnosis of Gastric Cancer Polyps Using Partial Surface Tactile Imaging
This work addresses the challenge of data scarcity and biases in endoscopic diagnosis for gastric cancer patients, representing an incremental improvement by integrating robotics and synthetic data.
The paper tackled the problem of diagnosing advanced gastric cancer polyps by proposing a robot-enabled system using a vision-based tactile sensor and machine learning to classify tumors based on textural features, achieving successful evaluation with synthetic data compared to traditional models under partial contact conditions.
In this paper, to collectively address the existing limitations on endoscopic diagnosis of Advanced Gastric Cancer (AGC) Tumors, for the first time, we propose (i) utilization and evaluation of our recently developed Vision-based Tactile Sensor (VTS), and (ii) a complementary Machine Learning (ML) algorithm for classifying tumors using their textural features. Leveraging a seven DoF robotic manipulator and unique custom-designed and additively-manufactured realistic AGC tumor phantoms, we demonstrated the advantages of automated data collection using the VTS addressing the problem of data scarcity and biases encountered in traditional ML-based approaches. Our synthetic-data-trained ML model was successfully evaluated and compared with traditional ML models utilizing various statistical metrics even under mixed morphological characteristics and partial sensor contact.