Smart Videocapsule for Early Diagnosis of Colorectal Cancer: Toward Embedded Image Analysis
Résumé
For the last 20 years, wireless videocapsule technology has triggered a
lot of interest in the gastroenterologist community for the non-invasive early detection
of various gastrointestinal pathologies (ulcers, Chrones disease, polyp detection,
etc.). Nevertheless, in most of the European countries videocapsules are not
yet considered as a systematic valid alternative to classic endoscopies and colonoscopies.
Main reasons are in the existing technological limitations of videocapsules
that are of two kinds: (i) A limited battery life-time (8 hours usually ensured by
the manufacturer) that does not allow a complete imaging of the gastro intestinal
tract, and (ii) the limited performance of the device in terms of detection rate of particular
structures like polyps for instance which degenerations are at the origin of
colorectal cancer. To overpass these limitations, main idea of our work is to develop
a generation of smart videocapsules that takes advantage of the constant progress in
electronics and most precisely in embedded signal processing tasks. In this Chapter,
we give first a detailed overview of the most recent state-of-the-art related to
videocapsules from the technological perspective in order to clearly positioned our
work among the existing products and on going projects. In a second time, we propose
a synthetic recall of the Cyclope project in the framework of which we are
studying different strategies to improve the performance of current videocapsules in
the particular context of the early diagnosis of colorectal cancer (polyp detection).
We then propose a particular focus on the design optimization of the proposed algorithms from an electronic perspective. Most precisely, we give concrete elements
and quantitative estimation (time processing, embedding performance, etc.) to show
that embedding of the signal processing IP inside the videocapsule is feasible considering
the most recent FPGA-platform performance, and that such an integration
can bring a positive balance in terms of energy consumption by drastically reducing
the amount of transmitted data.