A rural-to-center artificial intelligence model for diagnosing Helicobacter pylori infection and premalignant gastric...

Diagnosing Helicobacter pylori infection and premalignant gastric conditions typically requires 13C urea breath testing or histological assessment, which are often unavailable in remote areas. A rural-to-center artificial intelligence (AI) model was developed and implemented to automatically evaluate upper endoscopy images from routine clinical practice.

Endoscopic images were collected from a rural hospital on Matsu Islands and a tertiary center across Taiwan Strait. During model development (2020–2022), AI algorithms were trained, validated, and tested to exclude low-quality and non-gastric images, segment gastric regions, and enhance mucosal features for detecting H. pylori infection and premalignant conditions. During model implementation (2023–2024), endoscopic images from a rural hospital were transmitted to the medical center for AI analyses, with results promptly returned.

In the development phase, diagnostic accuracies were 92.8% (95%CI 88.9%–96.6%) for H. pylori, 88.6% (95%CI 87.2%–90.0%) for atrophic gastritis, and 88.0% (95%CI 86.5%–89.5%) for intestinal metaplasia. In the implementation phase, 3518 rural residents underwent 13C urea breath testing or pepsinogen testing; 421 with positive results underwent endoscopy. No significant differences were observed between AI-predicted and clinically observed prevalence: H. pylori (13.9% vs. 12.9%; P = 0.55), atrophic gastritis (15.7% vs. 11.9%; P = 0.34), and intestinal metaplasia (27.6% vs. 22.4%; P = 0.32). Implementation-phase diagnostic accuracies were 91.3% (95%CI 88.0%–94.6%), 79.9% (95%CI 72.1%–86.3%), and 63.4% (95%CI 54.7%–71.6%), respectively.

AI enabled physicians in resource-limited settings to rapidly assess gastric health using routinely captured endoscopic images, bridging gaps in access and expertise.