Introduction
Every year, ~500,000 women are affected with cervical cancer worldwide and ~270,000 women succumb to this disease (1). The cervical cancer frequency is higher in still-advancing countries that typically have far fewer medical resources (2). As the world's population grows and ages, cases of cervical cancer have the potential to increase significantly.
The traditional biopsy routine for cervical cancer diagnosis is that gynecologists manually observe the uterine cervix with a colposcope and decide where to obtain a tissue sample for more detailed microscopic examination. There are problems to this method. First, colposcopes are large and expensive. Second, gynecologists require a great deal of practical experience in deciding correctly from which part of the cervix is best to obtain the tissue.
To address this shortcoming, the present study created a system of AI-assisted image diagnosis (AISD) for cervical lesions. This AI system can guide the inexperienced in their selection of the best biopsy sites. If AISD for cervical lesions could be normalized for use in professional practice, the biopsy itself might become obsolete, or used only when absolutely needed for a definitive opinion. This economical and simple improvement in diagnostic capabilities would reduce the burden for gynecologists and could be expanded to medical facilities in localities, regions and advancing countries that have fewer medical resources. This would be conducive for provision of proper medical treatments and decreasing the overall cervical cancer burden (Fig. 1).
Tanaka et al (3) were the first to report the capability of a smartphone for diagnostic-assistance (Smartscopy; Apple Inc.). They found that it can detect 90.8% of the same pathological cervical lesion detectable by colposcopy. The detection sensitivity of pathological lesions that were for cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN)2 or greater was 92%. From this work, they concluded that the imaging quality of Smartscopy is appropriate for diagnosis.
The aim of the present study was to achieve AISD for cervical lesion using images taken by Smartscopy and report the performance assessment of AISD for cervical lesions taken by colposcope. This system could be subsequently applied toward Smartscopy images.
Discussion
AI is being applied across various disciplines, including phonetic recognition, image recognition, face recognition and automated driving technology. Similarly, AI applications are expected to evolve rapidly in many medical fields (5). The medical sector is heavily burdened with many challenges to overcome. There is scarcity of medical professionals, area to area medical bias, bias between treatment departments, crushing labor hours, lapses in safety and stability of the medical delivery system. AI can potentially reduce or resolve many of these problems.
Incorporating AI into medical practices is expected to improve the medical environment across Japan. Patients could receive safer and more adequate medical services, the overload of medical professionals could be reduced and new methods of diagnosis and treatment could be developed.
The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has selected six important areas for AI development (6). These encompass genomic medicine, diagnostic imaging, assistance with diagnosis and treatment, drug development, caregiving for dementia and surgical assistance. Among these areas, diagnostic imaging is regarded the most practical for rapid AI adoption as most medical images are already digitized and application of established AI-associated technology would be easier.
The number of AI image recognition software has seen dramatic recent increase and there have already been reports of AI automated diagnosis being conducted (Table V).
As pioneers in this field, Hu et al (7) report that automated visual evaluation of cervigrams can identify precancer/cancer cases with great accuracy [area under the curve (AUC)=0.91]. Xue et al (8) report the potential of AI to address the colposcopic bottleneck, which could assist colposcopists in colposcopy image diagnosis, the detection of underlying CINs and the guidance of biopsy sites.
Yuan et al (9) report that the sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of the classification model to differentiate negative cases from positive cases were 85.38, 82.62 and 84.10%, respectively, with an AUC of 0.93. The recall and Sørensen-Dice coefficient of the segmentation model to segment suspicious lesions in acetic acid images were 84.73 and 61.64%, with an average accuracy of 95.59%. Furthermore, 84.67% of high-grade lesions were detected by the acetic detection model. Compared to colposcopists, the diagnostic system showed improved performance for ordinary colposcopy images but was slightly unsatisfactory for high-definition images.
Furthermore, Xue et al (10) report that automated visual evaluation by smartphones can be a useful adjunct to health-worker visual assessment with acetic acid, a cervical cancer screening method commonly used in low- and middle-resource settings. Miyagi et al (11) report the feasibility of using deep learning to classify cervical squamous epithelial lesions (SILs) from colposcopy images combined with human papillomavirus (HPV) types. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value and the AUC ± standard error for AI colposcopy combined with HPV types and pathological results were 0.956 (43/45), 0.833 (5/6), 0.977 (43/44), 0.714 (5/7) and 0.963±0.026, respectively.
Tan et al (12) report that computer-based deep learning methods can achieve high-accuracy fast cancer screening using thin-prep cytological test images. This system could classify the images and generate a test report in ~3 min with high performance (the sensitivity and specificity was 99.4 and 34.8%, respectively, with an AUC of 0.67).
In all of these reports, cervical pathology was divided into two or three categories, atypical squamous cells of undetermined significance, low grade (L)SIL (normal and CIN1) and high grade (H)SIL (CIN2 and over). The present study is the first (to the best of the authors' knowledge) to report the evaluation of AI image diagnosis using four categories. The average accuracy was 43.5% particularly for CIN2-3 and 44% for invasive cancer. This is lower than the accuracy of the other two categories. To further improve AI accuracy, the number of training dataset images for various methods was increased, but this was unsuccessful.
In the future, diagnosis using images captured by the Smartscope will be evaluated. It is hypothesized that AI accuracy might be improved with improved context and timing of image-acquisition.
The present study reported, for first time to the best of the authors' knowledge, on the integration of AI and human image diagnosis for uterine cervical pathological lesions. It was evident that AI-assisted image diagnosis could significantly improve the gynecologist's accuracy for diagnosing of the category of invasive cervical cancer and it tended to improve diagnosis accuracy for CIN2-3, but not CIN1 and normal.
When comparing the initial accuracy of AI and humans diagnoses, the accuracy of humans was higher for normal and CIN1 (64.8 and 54.4%, respectively. AI-assisted accuracy was higher for CIN2-3 and invasive cancer (58 and 48.5%, respectively).
For mammography screening, AI advances could be used to increase screening accuracy by reducing missed cancers and false positives. Salim et al (13) performed AI computer-aided detection algorithms as independent mammography readers and assessed the screening performance when combined with radiologists. The results indicate that AI computer-aided detection algorithms can assess screening mammograms with a sufficient diagnostic performance that could be further evaluated as an independent readers in prospective clinical trials.
Schaffter et al (14) evaluated whether AI could overcome human mammography interpretation limitations; >1,100 subjects, comprising 126 teams from 44 countries participated. The top-performing algorithms achieved an AUC of 0.858 (United States) and 0.903 (Sweden) and a specificity of 66.2% (United States) and 81.2% (Sweden) compared with the radiologists' sensitivity, which was lower than community-practice radiologists' specificity of 90.5% (United States) and 98.5% (Sweden). Combining top-performing algorithms and US radiologist assessments resulted in a higher AUC of 0.942 and achieved a significantly improved specificity (92.0%) at the same sensitivity.
Humans are still responsible for any AI-assisted diagnosis in Japan. At present, it need not be argued ‘Which is better, human or AI?’ or ‘Will humans be dumped into the dustbin of medical history?’ Instead, we are looking toward a way to realize the powerful potential of human and AI cooperation in medicine.
The present study has a limitation. The accurate diagnosis rate of AI-based diagnosis is in the 40% range, which cannot be used in clinical practice. This could be attributed to the evaluation of AI image diagnosis in four categories in the current study. In previous reports (7,9-12), the cervical pathology was divided into two or three categories. In the present study, the diagnostic accuracy when divided into two categories was 79.4% in HSIL and 87.0% in LSIL, comparable to other reports (7,9-12). In some reports, the accuracy for detecting HSIL by colposcopy was ~80-90%, the sensitivity was ~80% and specificity was ~70% (15,16). This level is felt necessary for clinical utility, which might be a limitation in colposcopic diagnosis.
For four categories of cervical cancer pathology diagnosis, the accuracy of AI image diagnosis was 57.8% for normal, 35.4% for CIN1, 40.5% for CIN2-3 and 44.2% for invasive cancer. AI-assisted image diagnosis significantly improved the diagnostic accuracy of the gynecologist for invasive cancer and tended to improve slightly the gynecologist's accuracy for CIN2-3, but it did not improve the gynecologist's accuracy regarding the categories of CIN1 and normal cervix.