PurposeWireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a non-invasive technology used for diagnosing gastrointestinal abnormalities. A single examination generates ∼55,000 images, making manual review both time-consuming and costly for doctors. Therefore, the development of computer vision-assisted systems is highly desirable to aid in the diagnostic process.ApproachWe presents a deep learning approach leveraging knowledge distillation (KD) from a convolutional neural network (CNN) teacher model to a vision transformer (ViT) student model for gastrointestinal abnormality recognition. The CNN teacher model utilizes attention mechanisms and depth-wise separable convolutions to extract features from WCE images, supervising the ViT in learning these representations.ResultsThe proposed method achieves accuracy of 97% and 96% on the Kvasir and KID datasets, respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness in distinguishing normal from abnormal regions and bleeding from non-bleeding cases. The proposed approach offers computational efficiency and generalization to unseen datasets, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods.ConclusionsWe proposed a deep learning approach utilizing CNNs and a ViT with KD to effectively classify gastrointestinal diseases in WCE images. It demonstrates promising performance on public datasets, distinguishing normal from abnormal regions and bleeding from non-bleeding cases while offering optimal computational efficiency compared with existing methods, making it suitable for GI disease applications.