Hyperspectral Imaging Combined with Artificial Intelligence in the Early Detection of Esophageal Cancer

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Detection of early esophageal cancer is important to improve patient survival, however, early diagnosis of the cancer cells is difficult, even for experienced endoscopists. This article provides a new method by using hyperspectral imaging and a deep learning diagnosis model to classify and diagnose esophageal cancer using a single-shot multibox detector. The accuracy of the results when using an RGB image in WLI was 83% and while using the spectrum data the accuracy was increased to 88%. There was an increase of 5% in WLI. The accuracy of the results when using an RGB image in NBI was 86% and while using the spectrum data the accuracy was increased to 91%. There was an increase of 5% in NBI. This study proves that the accuracy of prediction when using the spectrum data has been significantly improved and the diagnosis of narrow-band endoscopy data is more sensitive than that of white-light endoscopy. ABSTRACT: This study uses hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and a deep learning diagnosis model that can identify the stage of esophageal cancer and mark the locations. This model simulates the spectrum data from the image using an algorithm developed in this study which is combined with deep learning for the classification and diagnosis of esophageal cancer using a single-shot multibox detector (SSD)-based identification system. Some 155 white-light endoscopic images and 153 narrow-band endoscopic images of esophageal cancer were used to evaluate the prediction model. The algorithm took 19 s to predict the results of 308 test images and the accuracy of the test results of the WLI and NBI esophageal cancer was 88 and 91%, respectively, when using the spectral data. Compared with RGB images, the accuracy of the WLI was 83% and the NBI was 86%. In this study, the accuracy of the WLI and NBI was increased by 5%, confirming that the prediction accuracy of the HSI detection method is significantly improved.