Pre-Cancerous Stomach Lesion Detections with Multispectral-Augmented Endoscopic Prototype

In this paper, we are interested in the in vivo detection of pre-cancerous stomach lesions. Pre-cancerous lesions are unfortunately rarely explored in research papers as most of them are focused on cancer detection or conducted ex-vivo. For this purpose, a novel prototype is introduced. It consists of a standard endoscope with multispectral cameras, an optical setup, a fiberscope, and an external light source. Reflectance spectra are acquired in vivo on 16 patients with a healthy stomach, chronic gastritis, or intestinal metaplasia. A specific pipeline has been designed for the classification of spectra between healthy mucosa and different pathologies. The pipeline includes a wavelength clustering algorithm, spectral features computation, and the training of a classifier in a “leave one patient out” manner. Good classification results, around 80%, have been obtained, and two attractive wavelength ranges were found in the red and near-infrared ranges: [745, 755 nm] and [780, 840 nm]. The new prototype and the associated results give good arguments in favor of future common use in operating rooms, during upper gastrointestinal exploration of the stomach for the detection of stomach diseases.