Predicting Pathology in Medical Decision Support Systems in Endoscopy of the Gastrointestinal Tract

Since medical endoscopy is a minimally invasive and relatively painless procedure, allowing to inspect the inner cavities of the human body, endoscopes play an important role in modern medicine. In medical practice different organs such as the respiratory tract, the urinary tract, and the female reproductive system are regularly inspected by using an endoscope. Another important field in medical endoscopy, which this chapter focuses at, is the inspection of the gastrointestinal tract (GI tract). Based on endoscopy of the GI tract, physicians are able to detect severe diseases already in early development stages and therefore the mortality rate for many diseases, especially different types of cancers, has been lowered drastically throughout the last years. Some examples of conditions which are known to be pre-malignant or to increase the risk of