Assessment of hyperspectral imaging and CycleGAN-simulated narrowband techniques to detect early esophageal cancer

The clinical signs and symptoms of esophageal cancer (EC) are often not discernible until the intermediate or advanced phases. The detection of EC in advanced stages significantly decreases the survival rate to below 20%. This study conducts a comparative analysis of the efficacy of several imaging techniques, including white light image (WLI), narrowband imaging (NBI), cycle-consistent adversarial network simulated narrowband image (CNBI), and hyperspectral imaging simulated narrowband image (HNBI), in the early detection of esophageal cancer (EC). In conjunction with Kaohsiung Armed Forces General Hospital, a dataset consisting of 1000 EC pictures was used, including 500 images captured using WLI and 500 images captured using NBI. The CycleGAN model was used to generate the CNBI dataset. Additionally, a novel method for HSI imaging was created with the objective of generating HNBI pictures. The evaluation of the efficacy of these four picture types in early detection of EC was conducted using three indicators: CIEDE2000, entropy, and the structural similarity index measure (SSIM). Results of the CIEDE2000, entropy, and SSIM analyses suggest that using CycleGAN to generate CNBI images and HSI model for creating HNBI images is superior in detecting early esophageal cancer compared to the use of conventional WLI and NBI techniques.