A quantitative performance measure for a clinical evaluation of comb structure removal algorithms in flexible endoscopy

Modern techniques for technical inspection as well as medical diagnostics and therapy in keyhole-surgery scenarios make use of flexible endoscopes. Common to both application fields are very small natural or manmade entry points to the observed scene, as well as the complexity of the hollow itself. These make the use of rigid lens-based endoscopes or tip chip videoscopes impossible. Due to the fact that the fiber-optic image guide of a flexible endoscope introduces a comb structure to the acquired images, many research has been devoted to algorithms for an effective removal of such artifacts. Oftentimes, this research has been motivated by the fact, that the comb structure prevents an application of some well-established methods offered by the computer vision and image processing community. Unfortunately, the performance of the presented approaches are commonly visually evaluated or with respect to proprietary, non-standardized metrics. Thus, the performances of individual algorithms are hard to compare with each other. For this reasons, we propose a performance measure for fiber-optic imaging devices that has been motivated by the physics of optics. In this field, an optical system is frequently described by linear systems theory and the system's quality can be expressed by its transfer function. The determination of this transfer function has been standardized by the ISO for lens based imaging systems and represents a widely accepted measure for the quality of such systems. In this contribution, we present methods that account for fiber-optic imaging systems and thus enable a standardized performance evaluation. Finally, we demonstrate its use by comparing two recent state of the art comb structure removal algorithms, each of them being a representative of a spatial and a frequency domain method, respectively.