Esophageal cancer is a serious threat to the health of Chinese people. The key to solve this problem is early diagnosis and early treatment, and the most important method is endoscopic screening. The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology makes its application and research in the field of digestive endoscopy growing, and it is expected to become the "right-hand man" for endoscopists in the early diagnosis of esophageal cancer. Currently, the application of multimodal and multifunctional AI systems has achieved good performance in the diagnosis of superficial esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and precancerous lesions. This study summarized and reviewed the research progress of AI in the diagnosis of superficial esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and precancerous lesions, and also explored its development direction in the future.
Esophageal cancer is an aggressive malignancy with high morbidity and poor prognosis. Symptoms of early esophageal cancer are insidious and difficult to detect, while advanced esophageal obstruction, lesion infiltration and metastasis seriously affect patients’ quality of life. Early detection and treatment can help to increase the survival chance of patients. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) has shown remarkable success in diagnosis of esophageal cancer, highlighting the great potential of new AI-assisted diagnostic modalities. This paper aims to review recent progress of AI in the diagnosis of esophageal cancer and to prospect its clinical application.
ObjectiveTo explore the application value of artificial intelligence in medical research assistance, and analyze the key paths to achieve precise execution of model instructions, improvement of model interpretation completeness, and control of hallucinations. MethodsTaking esophageal cancer research as the scenario, five types of literature including treatises, case reports, reviews, editorials, and guidelines were selected for model interpretation tests. The model performance was systematically evaluated from five dimensions: recognition accuracy, format correctness, instruction execution precision, interpretation reliability, and interpretation completeness. The performance differences of Ruibing Agent, GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, DeepSeek V3, and DouBao-pro models in medical literature interpretation tasks were compared. ResultsA total of 1875 tests were conducted on the five models. Due to the poor recognition accuracy of the editorial type, the overall recognition accuracy of Ruibing Agent was significantly lower than other models (92.0% vs. 100.0%, P＜0.001). In terms of format correctness, Ruibing Agent was significantly better than Claude 3.7 Sonnet (98.7% vs. 92.0%, P=0.002) and GPT-4o (98.7% vs. 78.9%, P＜0.001). In terms of instruction execution precision, Ruibing Agent was better than GPT-4o (97.3% vs. 80.0%, P＜0.001). In terms of interpretation reliability, Ruibing Agent was significantly lower than Claude 3.7 Sonnet (84.0% vs. 92.0%, P=0.010) and DeepSeek V3 (84.0% vs. 94.7%, P＜0.001). In terms of interpretation completeness, the median scores of Ruibing Agent, GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, DeepSeek V3, and DouBao-pro were 0.71, 0.60, 0.85, 0.74, and 0.77, respectively. ConclusionRuibing Agent has significant advantages in terms of formatted interpretation of medical literature and instruction execution accuracy. In the future, it is necessary to focus on optimizing the recognition ability of editorial types, strengthening the coverage ability of core elements of various types of literature to improve interpretation completeness, and improving content reliability through optimizing the confidence mechanism to ensure the rigor of medical literature interpretation.