Wireless capsule endoscopy anomaly classification via dynamic multi-task learning

Abstract

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) provides a painless, non-invasive means for early gastrointestinal disease detection and cancer prevention. However, clinicians must diagnose only about 5% of lesion images from tens of thousands of frames, highlighting the need for computer-assisted diagnostic methods to enhance efficiency and reduce the elevated misdiagnosis rates attributed to visual fatigue. Previous research heavily relied on module design, an effective yet highly coupled method with the baseline and incurring additional computational costs. This paper proposes a dynamic multi-task learning method that combines triplet loss and weighted cross-entropy loss to respectively guide the model in learning compact fine-grained representations and establishing less biased decision boundaries, without incurring additional computational costs. Our method outperforms previous advanced methods on two publicly available datasets, achieving an F1 score of 96.47% on Kvasir-Capsule and an F1 score of 96.75% with an accuracy of 96.72% on CAD-CAP. Visualization of the representations and heatmaps confirms the model’s precision in focusing on the lesion area. The prediction model has been uploaded to https://github.com/xli122/WCE_MTL.