Colorectal cancer screening through colonoscopy continues to be the dominant global standard, as it allows identifying pre-cancerous or adenomatous lesions and provides the ability to remove them during the procedure itself. Nevertheless, failure by the endoscopist to identify such lesions increases the likelihood of lesion progression to subsequent colorectal cancer. Ultimately, colonoscopy remains operator-dependent, and the wide range of quality in colonoscopy examinations among endoscopists is influenced by variations in their technique, training, and diligence. This paper presents a novel real-time navigation guidance system for Optical Colonoscopy (OC). Our proposed system employs a real-time approach that displays both an unfolded representation of the colon and a local indicator directing to un-inspected areas. These visualizations are presented to the physician during the procedure, providing actionable and comprehensible guidance to un-surveyed areas in real-time, while seamlessly integrating into the physician's workflow. Through coverage experimental evaluation, we demonstrated that our system resulted in a higher polyp recall (PR) and high inter-rater reliability with physicians for coverage prediction. These results suggest that our real-time navigation guidance system has the potential to improve the quality and effectiveness of Optical Colonoscopy and ultimately benefit patient outcomes.

翻译：摘要：通过结肠镜进行结直肠癌筛查仍是全球主流标准，因其能识别癌前病变或腺瘤性病变，并在检查过程中直接切除。然而，内镜医师未能识别此类病变会增加其进展为结直肠癌的风险。归根结底，结肠镜检查高度依赖操作者，而内镜医师之间检查质量的差异受其技术、训练及细致程度的影响。本文提出了一种面向光学结肠镜（Optical Colonoscopy, OC）的新型实时导航引导系统。该系统采用实时方法，同步显示结肠展开图及指向未检查区域的局部指示器。上述可视化信息在检查过程中实时呈现给医师，为其提供直观可操作的未检区域引导，并无缝融入医师工作流程。通过覆盖范围实验评估证明，该系统在息肉召回率（Polyp Recall, PR）方面表现更优，且医师间覆盖预测的一致性信度较高。结果表明，我们的实时导航引导系统有望提升光学结肠镜的检查质量与效能，最终改善患者预后。