Artificial intelligence for discrimination of Crohn's disease and gastrointestinal tuberculosis: A systematic review

Discrimination of gastrointestinal tuberculosis (GITB) and Crohn's disease (CD) is difficult. Use of artificial intelligence (AI)-based technologies may help in discriminating these two entities.

We conducted a systematic review on the use of AI for discrimination of GITB and CD. Electronic databases (PubMed and Embase) were searched on June 6, 2022, to identify relevant studies. We included any study reporting the use of clinical, endoscopic, and radiological information (textual or images) to discriminate GITB and CD using any AI technique. Quality of studies was assessed with MI-CLAIM checklist.

Out of 27 identified results, a total of 9 studies were included. All studies used retrospective databases. There were five studies of only endoscopy-based AI, one of radiology-based AI, and three of multiparameter-based AI. The AI models performed fairly well with high accuracy ranging from 69.6-100%. Text-based convolutional neural network was used in three studies and Classification and regression tree analysis used in two studies. Interestingly, irrespective of the AI method used, the performance of discriminating GITB and CD did not match in discriminating from other diseases (in studies where a third disease was also considered).

The use of AI in differentiating GITB and CD seem to have acceptable accuracy but there were no direct comparisons with traditional multiparameter models. The use of multiple parameter-based AI models have the potential for further exploration in search of an ideal tool and improve on the accuracy of traditional models.