Artificial Intelligence-Based Multiclass Classification of Benign or Malignant Mucosal Lesions of the Stomach

Gastric cancer (GC) is one of the leading causes of cancer-related death worldwide. It takes some time from chronic gastritis to develop in GC. Early detection of GC will help patients obtain timely treatment. Understanding disease evolution is crucial for the prevention and treatment of GC. Here, we present a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based system to detect abnormalities in the gastric mucosa. We identified normal mucosa, chronic gastritis, and intestinal-type GC: this is the most common route of gastric carcinogenesis. We integrated digitalizing histopathology of whole-slide images (WSIs), stain normalization, a deep CNN, and a random forest classifier. The staining variability of WSIs was reduced significantly through stain normalization, and saved the cost and time of preparing new slides. Stain normalization improved the effect of the CNN model. The accuracy rate at the patch-level reached 98.4%, and 94.5% for discriminating normal -> chronic gastritis -> GC. The accuracy rate at the WSIs-level for discriminating normal tissue and cancerous tissue reached 96.0%, which is a state-of-the-art result. Survival analyses indicated that the features extracted from the CNN exerted a significant impact on predicting the survival of cancer patients. Our CNN model disclosed significant potential for adjuvant diagnosis of gastric diseases, especially GC, and usefulness for predicting the prognosis.