Automatic lesion detection for narrow-band imaging bronchoscopy

Early detection of cancer is crucial for lung cancer patients, as it determines disease prognosis. Lung cancer typically starts as bronchial lesions along the airway walls. Recent research has indicated that narrow-band imaging (NBI) bronchoscopy enables more effective bronchial lesion detection than other bronchoscopic modalities. Unfortunately, NBI video can be hard to interpret because physicians currently are forced to perform a time-consuming subjective visual search to detect bronchial lesions in a long airway-exam video. As a result, NBI bronchoscopy is not regularly used in practice. To alleviate this problem, we propose an automatic two-stage real-time method for bronchial lesion detection in NBI video and perform a first-of-its-kind pilot study of the method using NBI airway exam video collected at our institution.