Recent Advances in Medical Image Processing and Diagnosis Technology for Capsule Endoscope Systems

Abstract

Recently, Capsule Endoscope(CE) system is receiving great attention as a innovative convergence technology that allows doctors to examine the digestive tract of a human body in the minimum invasive way. Once patients swallow the vitamin pill-sized capsule, doctors can detect disease such as blood-based abnormalities, polyps, ulcers, and Crohn's disease through the image information delivered by wireless or human body communication module in CE. Although CE is really a innovative technology, it still suffers from some drawbacks in terms of correct diagnosis of lesion and analysis required time. Due to the massive images approximately 60～120 thousand frames taken by miniature camera in the CE, doctors spend too much time examining the images and analyzing the lesions. Therefore, to lighten the burden of doctors, software tools for fast diagnosis and medical image processing techniques for correct diagnosis of lesion are essential in CE system. In this paper, we investigate the latest trends of diagnosis tools and image processing techniques based on major makers of CE systems, which are hardly known to the general public.