Use of a convolutional neural network for classifying microvessels of superficial esophageal squamous cell carcinomas

The morphological diagnosis of microvessels on the surface of superficial esophageal squamous cell carcinomas using magnifying endoscopy with narrow-band imaging is widely used in clinical practice. Nevertheless, inconsistency, even among experts, remains a problem. We constructed a convolutional neural network-based computer-aided diagnosis system to classify the microvessels of superficial esophageal squamous cell carcinomas and evaluated its diagnostic performance.

In this retrospective study, a cropped magnifying endoscopy with narrow-band images from superficial esophageal squamous cell carcinoma lesions was used as the dataset. All images were assessed by three experts, and classified into three classes, Type B1, B2, and B3, based on the Japan Esophagus Society classification. The dataset was divided into training and validation datasets. A convolutional neural network model (ResNeXt-101) was trained and tuned with the training dataset. To evaluate diagnostic accuracy, the validation dataset was assessed by the computer-aided diagnosis system and eight endoscopists.

In total, 1777 and 747 cropped images (total, 393 lesions) were included in the training and validation datasets, respectively. The diagnosis system took 20.3 s to evaluate the 747 images in the validation dataset. The microvessel classification accuracy of the computer-aided diagnosis system was 84.2%, which was higher than the average of the eight endoscopists (77.8%, P < 0.001). The area under the receiver operating characteristic curves for diagnosing Type B1, B2, and B3 vessels were 0.969, 0.948, and 0.973, respectively.

The computer-aided diagnosis system showed remarkable performance in the classification of microvessels on superficial esophageal squamous cell carcinomas.