Endoscopy is an important tool for the diagnosis of early gastric cancer. Therefore, a combination of artificial intelligence and endoscopy has the ability to increase the speed and efficiency of early gastric cancer diagnosis. YOU ONLY LOOK ONCE (YOLO) is an advanced object detection depth neural network algorithm that has not been widely used in gastrointestinal image recognition.
We developed an artificial intelligence system herein referred to as “EGC-YOLO” for the rapid and accurate diagnosis of endoscopic images from early gastric cancer.
More than 40000 gastroscopic images from 1653 patients in Yixing people’s Hospital were used as the training set for the system, while endoscopic images from the other two hospitals were used as external validation test sets. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, Youden index and ROC curve were analyzed to evaluate detection efficiencies for EGC-YOLO.
EGC-YOLO was able to diagnose early gastric cancer in the two test sets with a high superiority and efficiency. The accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and positive predictive value for Test Sets 1 and 2 were 85.15% and 86.02%, 85.36% and 83.02%, 84.41% and 92.21%, and 95.22% and 95.65%, respectively. In Test Sets 1 and 2, the corresponding Threshold-values were 0.02, 0.16 and 0.17 at the maximum of the Youden index. An increase in Threshold-values was associated with a downward trend in sensitivity and accuracy, while specificity remained relatively stable at more than 80%.
The EGC-YOLO system is superior for the efficient, accurate and rapid detection of early gastric cancer lesions. For different data sets, it is important to select the appropriate threshold-value in advance to achieve the best performance of the EGC-YOLO system.