Santone Antonella, Cesarelli Mario, Mercaldo Francesco
Department of Medicine and Health Sciences "Vincenzo Tiberio", University of Molise, 86100 Campobasso, Italy.
Department of Engineering, University of Sannio, 82100 Benevento, Italy.
Bioengineering (Basel). 2025 Feb 26;12(3):236. doi: 10.3390/bioengineering12030236.
Early detection of colorectal polyps through endoscopic colonoscopy is crucial in reducing colorectal cancer mortality. While automated polyp segmentation has been explored to enhance detection accuracy and efficiency, challenges remain in achieving precise boundary delineation, particularly for small or flat polyps. In this work, we propose a novel U-Net-based segmentation framework specifically optimized for real-world endoscopic colonoscopy data. Unlike conventional approaches, our method leverages high-resolution frames with pixel-level ground-truth annotations to achieve superior segmentation performance. The U-Net architecture, with its symmetric encoder-decoder design and skip connections, is further adapted to enhance both high-level contextual understanding and fine-grained detail preservation. Our model has been rigorously evaluated on a real-world dataset, demonstrating state-of-the-art accuracy in polyp boundary segmentation, even in challenging cases. By improving detection consistency and reducing observer variability, our approach provides a robust tool to support gastroenterologists in clinical decision-making. Beyond real-time clinical applications, this work contributes to advancing automated and standardized polyp detection, paving the way for more reliable AI-assisted endoscopic analysis.
通过内镜结肠镜检查早期发现结直肠息肉对于降低结直肠癌死亡率至关重要。虽然已经探索了自动息肉分割以提高检测准确性和效率,但在实现精确的边界描绘方面仍然存在挑战,特别是对于小的或扁平的息肉。在这项工作中,我们提出了一种基于U-Net的新型分割框架,该框架专门针对真实世界的内镜结肠镜检查数据进行了优化。与传统方法不同,我们的方法利用具有像素级真实标注的高分辨率帧来实现卓越的分割性能。U-Net架构及其对称的编码器-解码器设计和跳跃连接进一步进行了调整,以增强高级上下文理解和细粒度细节保留。我们的模型已经在一个真实世界的数据集上进行了严格评估,即使在具有挑战性的情况下,也在息肉边界分割方面展示了最先进的准确性。通过提高检测一致性和减少观察者变异性,我们的方法提供了一个强大的工具来支持胃肠病学家进行临床决策。除了实时临床应用之外,这项工作有助于推进自动和标准化的息肉检测,为更可靠的人工智能辅助内镜分析铺平道路。