Automatic Detection of Gastric Wall Structure Based on Oral Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound and Its Application on Tumor Screening

Abstract

Gastric cancer is the second most lethal type of malignant tumor in the world. Early diagnosis of gastric cancer can reduce the transformation to advanced cancer and improve the early treatment rate. As a cheap, real-time, non-invasive examination method, oral contrast-enhanced ultrasonography (OCUS) is a more acceptable way to diagnose gastric cancer than interventional diagnostic methods such as gastroscopy. In this paper, we proposed a new method for the diagnosis of gastric diseases by automatically analyzing the hierarchical structure of gastric wall in gastric ultrasound images, which is helpful to quantify the diagnosis information of gastric diseases and is a useful attempt for early screening of gastric cancer. We designed a gastric wall detection network based on U-net. On this basis, anisotropic diffusion technology was used to extract the layered structure of the gastric wall. A simple and useful gastric cancer screening model was obtained by calculating and counting the thickness of the five-layer structure of the gastric wall. The experimental results showed that our model can accurately identify the gastric wall, and it was found that the layered parameters of abnormal gastric wall is significantly different from that of normal gastric wall. For the screening of gastric disease, a statistical model based on gastric wall stratification can give a screening accuracy of 95% with AUC of 0.92.

The seven-layer stratification theory of gastric wall under ultrasonography and its clinical application

“…The gastric contrast ultrasonography for healthy individuals can be distinguished into five distinct layers, which behave as "strongweak-strong-weak-strong" echo in sonograms. However, there remains controversy about the histological basis of each sonographic layer, especially the location of muscularis mucosae [3,4]. This study describes a "seven-layer stratification theory" of the gastric wall based on the histological and physical basis of ultrasonography and evaluates the clinical application value of this theory in the context of gastrointestinal disease.…”