A new artificial intelligence system for both stomach and small-bowel capsule endoscopy

Despite the benefits of artificial intelligence in small-bowel (SB) capsule endoscopy (CE) image reading, information on its application in the stomach and SB CE is lacking.

In this multicenter, retrospective diagnostic study, gastric imaging data were added to the deep learning-based SmartScan (SS), which has been described previously. A total of 1069 magnetically controlled GI CE examinations (comprising 2,672,542 gastric images) were used in the training phase for recognizing gastric pathologies, producing a new artificial intelligence algorithm named SS Plus. A total of 342 fully automated, magnetically controlled CE examinations were included in the validation phase. The performance of both senior and junior endoscopists with both the SS Plus-assisted reading (SSP-AR) and conventional reading (CR) modes was assessed.

SS Plus was designed to recognize 5 types of gastric lesions and 17 types of SB lesions. SS Plus reduced the number of CE images required for review to 873.90 (median, 1000; interquartile range [IQR], 814.50-1000) versus 44,322.73 (median, 42,393; IQR, 31,722.75-54,971.25) for CR. Furthermore, with SSP-AR, endoscopists took 9.54 minutes (median, 8.51; IQR, 6.05-13.13) to complete the CE video reading. In the 342 CE videos, SS Plus identified 411 gastric and 422 SB lesions, whereas 400 gastric and 368 intestinal lesions were detected with CR. Moreover, junior endoscopists remarkably improved their CE image reading ability with SSP-AR.

Our study shows that the newly upgraded deep learning-based algorithm SS Plus can detect GI lesions and help improve the diagnostic performance of junior endoscopists in interpreting CE videos.