Abstract
Colorectal cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related deaths globally. In recent years, the use of convolutional neural networks in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) has facilitated simpler detection of early lesions like polyps during real-time colonoscopy. However, the majority of existing techniques require a large training dataset annotated by experienced experts. To alleviate the laborious task of image annotation and utilize the vast amounts of readily available unlabeled colonoscopy data to further improve the polyp detection ability, this study proposed a novel self-supervised representation learning method called feature pyramid siamese networks (FPSiam). First, a feature pyramid encoder module was proposed to effectively extract and fuse both local and global feature representations among colonoscopic images, which is important for dense prediction tasks like polyp detection. Next, a self-supervised visual feature representation containing the general feature of colonoscopic images is learned by the siamese networks. Finally, the feature representation will be transferred to the downstream colorectal polyp detection task. A total of 103 videos (861,400 frames), 100 videos (24,789 frames), and 60 videos (15,397 frames) in the LDPolypVideo dataset are used to pre-train, train, and test the performance of the proposed FPSiam and its counterparts, respectively. The experimental results have illustrated that our FPSiam approach obtains the optimal capability, which is better than that of other state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods and is also higher than the method based on transfer learning by 2.3 mAP and 3.6 mAP for two typical detectors. In conclusion, FPSiam provides a cost-efficient solution for developing colorectal polyp detection systems, especially in conditions where only a small fraction of the dataset is labeled while the majority remains unlabeled. Besides, it also brings fresh perspectives into other endoscopic image analysis tasks.