ColNav: Real-Time Colon Navigation for Colonoscopy
Netanel Frank Erez Posner Emmanuelle Muhlethaler Adi Zholkover Moshe Bouhnik
Colorectal cancer screening through colonoscopy continues to be the dominant
global standard, as it allows identifying pre-cancerous or adenomatous lesions
and provides the ability to remove them during the procedure itself.
Nevertheless, failure by the endoscopist to identify such lesions increases the
likelihood of lesion progression to subsequent colorectal cancer. Ultimately,
colonoscopy remains operator-dependent, and the wide range of quality in
colonoscopy examinations among endoscopists is influenced by variations in
their technique, training, and diligence. This paper presents a novel real-time
navigation guidance system for Optical Colonoscopy (OC). Our proposed system
employs a real-time approach that displays both an unfolded representation of
the colon and a local indicator directing to un-inspected areas. These
visualizations are presented to the physician during the procedure, providing
actionable and comprehensible guidance to un-surveyed areas in real-time, while
seamlessly integrating into the physician's workflow. Through coverage
experimental evaluation, we demonstrated that our system resulted in a higher
polyp recall (PR) and high inter-rater reliability with physicians for coverage
prediction. These results suggest that our real-time navigation guidance system
has the potential to improve the quality and effectiveness of Optical
Colonoscopy and ultimately benefit patient outcomes.