Nowadays colorectal cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death worldwide. In recent years there has been an increase in interest in research aimed at the development of automatic methods for the detection of polyps and the most relevant results have been achieved through deep learning techniques. However, the performance of these approaches is strongly associated with the use of large and varied datasets. Samples of colonoscopy images are publicly available, but the amount and limited variation may be insufficient for successful training. Based on this observation, a new approach is described in this thesis with the objective of increasing the quantity and variation of colonoscopy images, improving the results of segmentation and detection of polyps. Unlike other works found in the literature that use traditional data augmentation approaches and the combination of images from other exam modalities, the proposed methodology emphasizes the creation of new samples by inserting polyps in publicly available colonoscopy images. The insertion strategy makes use of synthetically generated polyps as well as real polyps, in addition to applying processing techniques to preserve the realistic aspect of the images, while automatically creating more diverse samples with their appropriate labels for training purposes. Convolutional neural networks trained with these improved datasets have shown promising results in the context of segmentation and detection. The improvements obtained indicate that the implementation of new methods for the automatic improvement of samples in medical image datasets has the potential to positively affect the training of convolutional networks.