Abstract

Colorectal polyps are important precursors to colon cancer, the third most common cause of cancer mortality for both men and women. It is a disease where early detection is of crucial importance. Colonoscopy is commonly used for early detection of cancer and precancerous pathology. It is a demanding procedure requiring a significant amount of time from specialized physicians and nurses, in addition to a significant miss-rates of polyps by specialists. Automated polyp detection in colonoscopy videos has been demonstrated to be a promising way to handle this problem. However, polyps detection is a challenging problem due to the availability of limited amount of training data and large appearance variations of polyps. To handle this problem, we propose a novel deep learning method Y-Net that consists of two encoder networks with a decoder network. Our proposed Y-Net method relies on efficient use of pre-trained and un-trained models with novel sum-skip-concatenation operations. Each of the encoders are trained with encoder specific learning rate along the decoder. Compared with the previous methods employing hand-crafted features or 2-D/3-D convolutional neural network, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods for polyp detection with 7.3% F1-score and 13% recall improvement.