Quantitative Comparisons of Linked Color Imaging and White-Light Colonoscopy for Colorectal Polyp Analysis

The performance of imaging techniques has an important influence on the clinical diagnostic strategy of colorectal cancer. Linked color imaging (LCI) by laser endoscopy is a recently developed techniques, and its advantage in improving the analysis accuracy of colorectal polyps over white-light (WL) endoscopy has been demonstrated in previous clinical studies. However, there are no objective criteria to evaluate and compare the aforementioned endoscopy methods. This paper presents a new criterion, namely entropy of color gradients image (ECGI), which is based on color gradients distribution and provides a comprehensive and objective evaluating indicator of the performance of colorectal images. Our method extracts the color gradient image pairs of 143 colonoscopy polyps in the LCI-PairedColon database, which are generated with WL and LCI conditions, respectively. Then, we apply the morphological method to fix the deviation of light-reflecting regions, and the ECGI scores of sample pairs are calculated. Experimental results show that the average ECGI scores of LCI images (5.7071) were significantly higher than that of WL (4.6093). This observation is consistent with the clinical studies. Therefore, the effectiveness of the proposed criterion is demonstrated.