Diagnostic System for Intestinal Motility Disfunctions Using Video Capsule Endoscopy Santi Segu´ ı 1 , Laura Igual 1 , Fernando Vilari˜ no 1 , Petia Radeva 1,2 , Carolina Malagelada 3 , Fernando Azpiroz 3 , and Jordi Vitri` a 1,2 1 Computer Vision Center, Universitat Aut`onoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain 2 Departament de Matem`atica Aplicada i An`alisis, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain 3 Digestive System Research Unit, University Hospital Vall d’Hebron; Ciberehd; and Department of Medicine, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Abstract. Wireless Video Capsule Endoscopy is a clinical technique consisting of the analysis of images from the intestine which are pro- vided by an ingestible device with a camera attached to it. In this paper we propose an automatic system to diagnose severe intestinal motility disfunctions using the video endoscopy data. The system is based on the application of computer vision techniques within a machine learn- ing framework in order to obtain the characterization of diverse motil- ity events from video sequences. We present experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system and compare them with the ground-truth provided by the gastroenterologists. 1 Introduction Medical image analysis is an important research topic in the field of computer vision. Nowadays, images are crucial in many clinical procedures such as laser surgery, endoscopy and ultra sound scan, only to cite a few [1]. Moreover, in the last years a considerable effort has been done in the development of new image acquisition techniques increasing image accuracy and getting more image modalities with different views of the human body. Miniaturization of hardware is used to design sophisticated techniques allowing the analysis of parts of or- gans of the human body unattainable before. Wireless Video Capsule Endoscopy (WVCE) [2] is a novel technique using an ingestible device which allows to ac- cess to the entire bowel without surgery. This device consists of a small capsule of 11mm diameter and 25mm length, equipped with four illuminating leds, a camera, a battery and a wireless system (see Figure 1). The capsule is swallowed by the patient and travels along the intestinal tract. The captured images are transmitted by the radio frequency communication channel to a data recorder providing a video with two frames per second and 256 × 256 pixels of resolution. The analysis of intestinal motility activity is an important source of information for gastroenterologists to assess the presence of certain intestinal disfunctions. So far, motility assessment has been mainly performed by using invasive techniques, such as intestinal manometry. In this specific scenario, WVCE represents a much A. Gasteratos, M. Vincze, and J.K. Tsotsos (Eds.): ICVS 2008, LNCS 5008, pp. 251–260, 2008. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008