Application of artificial intelligence in the diagnosis of subepithelial lesions using endoscopic ultrasonography: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS) is the most common method for diagnosing gastrointestinal subepithelial lesions (SELs); however, it usually requires histopathological confirmation using invasive methods. Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have made significant progress in medical imaging diagnosis. The purpose of our research was to explore the application of AI in the diagnosis of SELs using EUS and to evaluate the diagnostic performance of AI-assisted EUS. Three databases, PubMed, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library, were comprehensively searched for relevant literature. RevMan 5.4.1 and Stata 17.0, were used to calculate and analyze the combined sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio (PLR), negative likelihood ratio (NLR), diagnostic odds ratio (DOR), and summary receiver-operating characteristic curve (SROC). Eight studies were selected from 380 potentially relevant studies for the meta-analysis of AI-aided EUS diagnosis of SELs. The combined sensitivity, specificity, and DOR of AI-aided EUS were 0.92 (95% CI, 0.85-0.96), 0.80 (95% CI, 0.70-0.87), and 46.27 (95% CI, 19.36-110.59), respectively). The area under the curve (AUC) was 0.92 (95% CI, 0.90-0.94). The AI model in differentiating GIST from leiomyoma had a pooled AUC of 0.95, sensitivity of 0.93, specificity of 0.88, PLR of 8.04, and NLR of 0.08. The combined sensitivity, specificity, and AUC of the AI-aided EUS diagnosis in the convolutional neural network (CNN) model were 0.93, 0.81, and 0.94, respectively. AI-aided EUS diagnosis using conventional brightness mode (B-mode) EUS images had a combined sensitivity of 0.92, specificity of 0.79, and AUC of 0.92. AI-aided EUS diagnosis based on patients had a combined sensitivity, specificity, and AUC of 0.95, 0.83, and 0.96, respectively. Additionally, AI-aided EUS was superior to EUS by experts in terms of sensitivity (0.93 vs. 0.71), specificity (0.81 vs. 0.69), and AUC (0.94 vs. 0.75). In conclusion, AI-assisted EUS is a promising and reliable method for distinguishing SELs, with excellent diagnostic performance. More multicenter cohort and prospective studies are expected to be conducted to further develop AI-assisted real-time diagnostic systems and validate the superiority of AI systems. Systematic Review Registration: PROSPERO (https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/), identifier CRD42022303990.