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DOI: 10.1055/s-0043-1765009
Computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) improves characterization of Barrett’s neoplasia by endoscopists
Aims Characterization of visible abnormalities in Barrett esophagus (BE) patients can be challenging, resulting in suboptimal diagnostic accuracy and poor inter-observer agreement. Computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) systems may assist endoscopists in neoplasia characterization. We aimed to develop and validate a CADx system for BE neoplasia.
Methods The CADx system received pretraining with ImageNet with consecutive domain-specific pretraining with GastroNet which includes >5 million endoscopy images. This pre-trained system was subsequently trained and internally validated using 1754 narrow-band imaging (NBI) images of early BE neoplasia (348 patients) and 1838 NBI images of non-dysplastic BE (197 patients), obtained in 8 international centers. The CADx system was tested on a test set which consisted of 30 videos (20 patients) of BE neoplasia and 60 videos (31 patients) of non-dysplastic BE. The test set was benchmarked by 44 general endoscopists without and with CADx assistance. Finally 10 international independent BE experts evaluated the test set.
Results The performances of CADx and endoscopists are presented in (▶Table [1]). The stand-alone sensitivity of the CADx system was superior to general endoscopists (p = 0.04). Assistance of the CADx system significantly increased the sensitivity (p<0.001) and specificity (p<0.001) of general endoscopists to the level of expert endoscopists. CADx assistance furthermore increased endoscopists’ confidence in characterization (P<0.001).
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Conclusions CADx assistance significantly increased characterization performance of BE neoplasia by general endoscopists to the level of expert endoscopists. The use of this CADx system may thereby improve daily Barrett surveillance.
Table 1: Performances of CADx and endoscopists on test sets
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Conflicts of interest
This project was funded by Olympus Endoscopy (Tokyo, Japan)
Publication History
Article published online:
14 April 2023
© 2023. European Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy. All rights reserved.
Georg Thieme Verlag KG
Rüdigerstraße 14, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany
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