Simultaneous Recognition of Atrophic Gastritis and Intestinal Metaplasia on White Light Endoscopic Images Based on Convolutional Neural Networks: A Multicenter Study

Patients with atrophic gastritis (AG) or gastric intestinal metaplasia (GIM) have elevated risk of gastric adenocarcinoma. Endoscopic screening and surveillance have been implemented in high incidence countries. The study aimed to evaluate the accuracy of a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for simultaneous recognition of AG and GIM. METHODS: Archived endoscopic white light images with corresponding gastric biopsies were collected from 14 hospitals located in different regions of China. Corresponding images by anatomic sites containing AG, GIM, and chronic non-AG were categorized using pathology reports. The participants were randomly assigned (8:1:1) to the training cohort for developing the CNN model (TResNet), the validation cohort for fine-tuning, and the test cohort for evaluating the diagnostic accuracy. The area under the curve (AUC), sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy with 95% confidence interval (CI) were calculated. RESULTS: A total of 7,037 endoscopic images from 2,741 participants were used to develop the CNN for recognition of AG and/or GIM. The AUC for recognizing AG was 0.98 (95% CI 0.97–0.99) with sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 96.2% (95% CI 94.2%–97.6%), 96.4% (95% CI 94.8%–97.9%), and 96.4% (95% CI 94.4%–97.8%), respectively. The AUC for recognizing GIM was 0.99 (95% CI 0.98–1.00) with sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 97.9% (95% CI 96.2%–98.9%), 97.5% (95% CI 95.8%–98.6%), and 97.6% (95% CI 95.8%–98.6%), respectively. DISCUSSION: CNN using endoscopic white light images achieved high diagnostic accuracy in recognizing AG and GIM.