Diagnostic Performance of Deep Learning Models for Gastric Intestinal Metaplasia Detection in Narrow-band Images

Gastric Intestinal Metaplasia (GIM) is one of the precancerous conditions in the gastric carcinogenesis cascade and its optical diagnosis during endoscopic screening is challenging even for seasoned endoscopists. Several solutions leveraging pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) have been recently proposed in order to assist human diagnosis. In this paper, we present a comparative study of these architectures in a new dataset containing GIM and non-GIM Narrow-band imaging still frames. We find that the surveyed DNNs perform remarkably well on average, but still measure sizeable inter-fold variability during cross-validation. An additional ad-hoc analysis suggests that these baseline architectures may not perform equally well at all scales when diagnosing GIM.Clinical relevance- Enhanching a clinician's ability to detect and localize intestinal metaplasia can be a crucial tool for gastric cancer management policies.