Clinical Experience of Digital Image Processing on Endoscopic Diagnosis of Esophageal Diseases

Abstract

We performed image processings on pictures obtained from patients with esophageal diseases by using an electronic endoscope TV-Endoscope TGI-70D (Toshiba Co., Ltd.) and a digital endoscopic image processor EIP-70A (Toshiba Co., Ltd.).
By using the EIP-70A, it becomes possible to perform a band pass filtering as structural enhancement and a histogram flattening as color enhancement in real-time. The band pass filtering clarified the fine vascular pattern of the esophago-gastric junction, the fine regenerative mucosal pattern of the reflux esophagitis and the three-dimentional structure of the advanced esophageal cancer. The histogram flattening exaggerated the redness in lesions of the advanced esophageal cancer, the O-II b typed esophageal cancer and the ectopic gastric mucosa of the upper esophagus.