Human Visual Transduction Mechanism-Inspired Adaptive Enhancement Network during Endoscopy

Disposable endoscopes are increasingly popular due to the lower risk of cross-contamination. Clearer endoscopes have shown the ability to improve adenoma detection rate. However, due to cost constraints, disposable endoscopes are equipped with smaller sensor arrays than reusable ones, resulting in lower resolution and degraded performance in both subjective and automated diagnostics. In this paper, an adaptive enhancement network (AEN) is proposed to recover the details of the lesion region, thereby assisting endoscopists during endoscopy. It combines the physiological mechanism of the human eyes with artificial intelligence. The framework of the AEN is analogous to the human visual transduction mechanism, which contains photoreceptor outer segments & outer nuclear layer, outer plexiform layer, inner nuclear layer, inner plexiform layer, and ganglion cell layer. The first layer includes the rod cell module (RCM) and the cone cell module (CCM). Rod cells are shape-sensitive and fast, while cone cells are sensitive to color and detail. Therefore, the RCM is designed to segment lesion regions and the CCM is designed to perform enhancement on them. The outer plexiform layer transmits the information from RCM to CCM. The inner nuclear layer refines boundaries according to the poisson equation with the information from the inner plexiform layer. Ultimately, a clearer image of the lesion regions is generated in the ganglion cell layer and transmitted to the brain (display). Experiments demonstrate that the AEN can effectively enhance lesion regions with much sharper edges, finer texture details, fewer blurs and artifacts. Comprehensive evaluations on four datasets further illustrate its generalizability. The AEN offers advantages in real-time processing.