Automatic Detection of Intestinal Bleeding using an Optical Sensor for Wireless Capsule Endoscopy

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) has been an effective and safe way to diagnose gastrointestinal (GI) disorders, such as, colon cancers, polyps and bleeding. The detection of bleeding and other anomalies is currently determined through conventional visual inspection of the WCE images by the physicians. An on-chip bleeding sensor is thus required, that can perform an automatic prescreening of the bleeding areas in real-time using blood's optical properties to assist the diagnosis. In this study, a spectrophotometer was initially used to evaluate the chromatic properties of blood. It is found that the reflection ratio pairs of 700 nm to 630 nm and 480 nm to 530 nm provide important statistics to separate blood from non-blood samples. It has been implemented hardware using small LEDs and photodiodes to validate the results. Therefore, the proposed sensor system works as a good candidate to be integrated in a WCE device to detect GI bleeding quickly and in real-time.