A learning without forgetting approach to incorporate artifact knowledge in polyp localization tasks

Colorectal polyps are abnormalities in the colon tissue that can develop into colorectal cancer. The survival rate for patients is higher when the disease is detected at an early stage and polyps can be removed before they develop into malignant tumors. Deep learning methods have become the state of art in automatic polyp detection. However, the performance of current models heavily relies on the size and quality of the training datasets. Endoscopic video sequences tend to be corrupted by different artifacts affecting visibility and hence, the detection rates. In this work, we analyze the effects that artifacts have in the polyp localization problem. For this, we evaluate the RetinaNet architecture, originally defined for object localization. We also define a model inspired by the learning without forgetting framework, which allows us to employ artifact detection knowledge in the polyp localization problem. Finally, we perform several experiments to analyze the influence of the artifacts in the performance of these models. To our best knowledge, this is the first extensive analysis of the influence of artifact in polyp localization and the first work incorporating learning without forgetting ideas for simultaneous artifact and polyp localization tasks.