Detecting gastrointestinal abnormalities with binary classification of the Kvasir-Capsule dataset : A TensorFlow deep learning study

Abstract: The early discovery of gastrointestinal (GI) disorders can significantly decrease the fatality rate of severe afflictions. Video capsule endoscopy (VCE) is a technique that produces an eight hour long recording of the GI tract that needs to be manually reviewed. This has led to the demand for AI-based solutions, but unfortunately, the lack of labeled data has been a major obstacle. In 2020 the Kvasir-Capsule dataset was produced which is the largest labeled dataset of GI abnormalities to date, but challenges still exist.The dataset suffers from unbalanced and very similar data created from labeled video frames. To avoid specialization to the specific data the creators of the set constructed an official split which is encouraged to use for testing. This study evaluates the use of transfer learning, Data augmentation and binary classification to detect GI abnormalities. The performance of machine learning (ML) classification is explored, with and without official split-based testing. For the performance evaluation, a specific focus will be on achieving a low rate of false negatives. The proposition behind this is that the most important aspect of an automated detection system for GI abnormalities is a low miss rate of possible lethal abnormalities. The results from the controlled experiments conducted in this study clearly show the importance of using official split-based testing. The difference in performance between a model trained and tested on the same set and a model that uses official split-based testing is significant. This enforces that without the use of official split-based testing the model will not produce reliable and generalizable results. When using official split-based testing the performance is improved compared to the initial baseline that is presented with the Kvasir-Capsule set. Some experiments in the study produced results with as low as a 1.56% rate of false negatives but with the cost of lowered performance for the normal class.