Endoscopic Image Classification Using ConvNeXt for GERD and Polyp Identification

Abstract

Early and accurate detection of gastrointestinal abnormalities, such as gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and intestinal polyps, is essential for preventing severe clinical complications. However, manual interpretation of endoscopic images is often constrained by inter-observer variability and time limitations. This study proposes a ConvNeXt-Tiny-based deep learning framework for multi-class classification of gastrointestinal endoscopic images. Experiments were conducted using the GastroEndoNet v3 dataset, which contains 4,006 images categorized into four classes: GERD, GERD Normal, Polyp, and Polyp Normal. A total of twelve experimental scenarios were designed to systematically evaluate the effects of dataset-provided augmentation, ImageNet-based normalization, and batch size on model performance. The optimal configuration, combining augmentation, normalization, and a batch size of 64, achieved a test accuracy of 99.75% and a macro-averaged F1- score of 0.9977, indicating stable convergence and strong generalization on unseen data. The results demonstrate that ConvNeXt-Tiny effectively captures disease-relevant visual patterns in endoscopic images while maintaining consistent performance across varying training conditions. Comparative evaluation with a transformer-based baseline further indicates that modern convolutional architectures remain competitive for gastrointestinal image classification tasks. The proposed framework establishes a reliable and lightweight baseline for automated gastrointestinal disease detection. Extensions to video-based endoscopy would require incorporating temporal information across consecutive frames, which is beyond the scope of the current image-based study.