Accuracies of Endoscopic Diagnosis ofHelicobacter pylori-Gastritis: Multicenter Prospective Study Using White Light Imaging and Linked Color Imaging

Introduction:The diagnosis ofHelicobacter pyloriinfection status with white light imaging (WLI) is difficult. We evaluated the accuracies of using WLI and linked color imaging (LCI) for diagnosingH. pylori-active gastritis in a multicenter prospective study setting.Methods:Patients who underwent esophagogastroduodenoscopy were prospectively included. The image collection process was randomized and anonymous, and the image set included 4 images with WLI or 4 images with LCI in the corpus that 5 reviewers separately evaluated. Active gastritis was defined as positive when there was diffuse redness in WLI and crimson coloring in LCI. TheH. pyloriinfection status was determined by the urea breath test and the serum antibody test. Cases in which both test results were negative but atrophy or intestinal metaplasia was histologically confirmed were defined as past infections. The primary endpoint was the diagnostic accuracies of WLI and LCI, and the secondary endpoint was inter-observer agreement.Results:Data for 127 patients were analyzed. The endoscopic diagnostic accuracy for active gastritis was 79.5 (sensitivity of 84.4 and specificity of 74.6) with WLI and 86.6 (sensitivity of 84.4 and specificity of 88.9) with LCI (p= 0.029). LCI significantly improved the accuracy in patients with past infections over WLI (36.8 in WLI and 78.9 in LCI,p< 0.01). The kappa values were 0.59 in WLI and 0.70 in LCI.Conclusions:LCI is useful for endoscopic diagnosis ofH. pylori-active or inactive gastritis, and it is advantageous for patients with past infections of inactive gastritis.