Diagnosis and segmentation effect of the ME-NBI-based deep learning model on gastric neoplasms in patients with suspected superficial lesions - a multicenter study

BACKGROUND: Endoscopically visible gastric neoplastic lesions (GNLs), including early gastric cancer and intraepithelial neoplasia, should be accurately diagnosed and promptly treated. However, a high rate of missed diagnosis of GNLs contributes to the potential risk of the progression of gastric cancer. The aim of this study was to develop a deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for the diagnosis and segmentation of GNLs under magnifying endoscopy with narrow-band imaging (ME-NBI) in patients with suspected superficial lesions. METHODS: ME-NBI images of patients with GNLs in two centers were retrospectively analysed. Two convolutional neural network (CNN) modules were developed and trained on these images. CNN1 was trained to diagnose GNLs, and CNN2 was trained for segmentation. An additional internal test set and an external test set from another center were used to evaluate the diagnosis and segmentation performance. RESULTS: CNN1 showed a diagnostic performance with an accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV) of 90.8%, 92.5%, 89.0%, 89.4% and 92.2%, respectively, and an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.928 in the internal test set. With CNN1 assistance, all endoscopists had a higher accuracy than for an independent diagnosis. The average intersection over union (IOU) between CNN2 and the ground truth was 0.5837, with a precision, recall and the Dice coefficient of 0.776, 0.983 and 0.867, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: This CAD system can be used as an auxiliary tool to diagnose and segment GNLs, assisting endoscopists in more accurately diagnosing GNLs and delineating their extent to improve the positive rate of lesion biopsy and ensure the integrity of endoscopic resection.