Detection of colorectal adenomas using artificial intelligence models in patients with chronic hepatitis C

Hepatitis C virus is known for its oncogenic potential, especially in hepatocellular carcinoma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Several studies have shown that chronic hepatitis C (CHC) has an increased risk of the development of colorectal cancer (CRC).

To analyze this positive relationship and develop an artificial intelligence (AI)-based tool using machine learning (ML) algorithms to stratify these patient populations into risk groups for CRC/adenoma detection.

To develop the AI automated calculator, we applied ML to train models to predict the probability and the number of adenomas detected on colonoscopy. Data sets were split into 70:30 ratios for training and internal validation. The Scikit-learn standard scaler was used to scale values of continuous variables. Colonoscopy findings were used as the gold standard and deep learning architecture was used to train six ML models for prediction. A Flask (customizable Python framework) application programming interface (API) was used to deploy the trained ML model with the highest accuracy as a web application. Finally, Heroku was used for the deployment of the web-based API to https://adenomadetection.herokuapp.com.

Of 415 patients, 206 had colonoscopy results. On internal validation, the Bernoulli naive Bayes model predicted the probability of adenoma detection with the highest accuracy of 56%, precision of 55%, recall of 55%, and F1 measure of 54%. Support vector regressor predicted the number of adenomas with the least mean absolute error of 0.905.

Our AI-based tool can help providers stratify patients with CHC for early referral for screening colonoscopy. Along with providing a numerical percentage, the calculator can also comment on the number of adenomatous polyps a gastroenterologist can expect, prompting a higher adenoma detection rate.