A prospective and comparative study on improving the diagnostic accuracy of early gastric cancer based on deep convolutional neural network real-time diagnosis system (with video)

Background: Endoscopic diagnosis of early gastric cancer (EGC) is a challenge. It is not clear whether deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) model could improve the endoscopists' diagnostic performance.

Methods: We established a DCNN-assisted system and found that accuracy of diagnosis is higher than endoscopists. We prospectively collected an independent image test set of 1289 images and a video test set of 130 patients from three endoscopic centers to compare the diagnostic efficacy of 12 endoscopists before and after DCNN model assistance. Accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, time, and AUC were the main indicators for comparison.

Results: The DCNN model discriminated EGC from the control group (including ulcers and chronic gastritis) with an AUC of 0.917, a sensitivity of 93.38% (95% CI 91.09-95.12%), and a specificity of 90.07% (95% CI 87.59-92.10%) in the image dataset. The video test dataset have an AUC of 0.930, a sensitivity of 96.92% (95% CI 88.83-99.78%), and a specificity of 89.23% (95% CI 79.11-94.98%). The diagnostic performance of novice endoscopists was comparable to those of expert endoscopists with the DCNN model's assistance (accuracy: 95.22 vs. 96.16%) in image test dataset. In the video test, the novice endoscopists, accuracy after DCNN assistance was also improved from 79.36 to 86.41%, and from 86.28 to 91.03% for expert endoscopists. The mean pairwise kappa value of endoscopists was increased significantly with the DCNN model's assistance (0.705-0.753 vs.0.767-0.890) in image testing, and (0.657-0.793 vs. 0.738-0.905) in video testing. The diagnostic duration reduced considerably with the assistance of the DCNN model from 7.09 ± 0.6 s to 5.05 ± 0.55 s in image test, and from 2392.17 ± 7.77 s to2378.34 ± 23.51 s in video test.

Conclusion: We developed a DCNN-assisted diagnostic system. And the system can improve the diagnostic performance of endoscopists and help novice endoscopists achieve diagnostic accuracy comparable to that of expert endoscopists.