Segmentation of angiodysplasia lesions in WCE images using a MAP approach with Markov random fields

Abstract

This paper deals with the segmentation of angiodysplasias in wireless capsule endoscopy images. These lesions are the cause of almost 10% of all gastrointestinal bleeding episodes, and its detection using the available software presents low sensitivity. This work proposes an automatic selection of a ROI using an image segmentation module based on the MAP approach where an accelerated version of the EM algorithm is used to iteratively estimate the model parameters. Spatial context is modeled in the prior probability density function using Markov Random Fields. The color space used was CIELab, specially the a component, which highlighted most these type of lesions.The proposed method is the first regarding this specific type of lesions, but when compared to other state-of-the-art segmentation methods, it almost doubles the results.