Real-time polyp detection model using convolutional neural networks

Colorectal cancer is a major health problem, where advances towards computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems to assist the endoscopist can be a promising path to improvement. Here, a deep learning model for real-time polyp detection based on a pre-trained YOLOv3 (You Only Look Once) architecture and complemented with a post-processing step based on an object-tracking algorithm to reduce false positives is reported. The base YOLOv3 network was fine-tuned using a dataset composed of 28,576 images labelled with locations of 941 polyps that will be made public soon. In a frame-based evaluation using isolated images containing polyps, a general F 1 score of 0.88 was achieved (recall = 0.87, precision = 0.89), with lower predictive performance in flat polyps, but higher for sessile, and pedunculated morphologies, as well as with the usage of narrow band imaging, whereas polyp size