Vision transformer distillation for enhanced gastrointestinal abnormality recognition in wireless capsule endoscopy images

Purpose: Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a non-invasive technology used for diagnosing gastrointestinal abnormalities. A single examination generates similar to 55,000 images, making manual review both time-consuming and costly for doctors. Therefore, the development of computer vision-assisted systems is highly desirable to aid in the diagnostic process. Approach: We presents a deep learning approach leveraging knowledge distillation (KD) from a convolutional neural network (CNN) teacher model to a vision transformer (ViT) student model for gastrointestinal abnormality recognition. The CNN teacher model utilizes attention mechanisms and depth-wise separable convolutions to extract features from WCE images, supervising the ViT in learning these representations. Results: The proposed method achieves accuracy of 97% and 96% on the Kvasir and KID datasets, respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness in distinguishing normal from abnormal regions and bleeding from non-bleeding cases. The proposed approach offers computational efficiency and generalization to unseen datasets, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods. Conclusions: We proposed a deep learning approach utilizing CNNs and a ViT with KD to effectively classify gastrointestinal diseases in WCE images. It demonstrates promising performance on public datasets, distinguishing normal from abnormal regions and bleeding from non-bleeding cases while offering optimal computational efficiency compared with existing methods, making it suitable for GI disease applications.