OBJECTIVE Little is known about the efficacy of using artificial
intelligence to identify laryngeal carcinoma from images of vocal
lesions taken in different hospitals with multiple laryngoscope systems.
This multicenter study was aimed to establish an artificial intelligence
system and provide a reliable auxiliary tool to screen for laryngeal
carcinoma. Study Design: Multicentre case-control study Setting: Six
tertiary care centers Participants: The laryngoscopy images were
collected from 2179 patients with vocal lesions. Outcome Measures: An
automatic detection system of laryngeal carcinoma was established based
on Faster R-CNN, which was used to distinguish vocal malignant and
benign lesions in 2179 laryngoscopy images acquired from 6 hospitals
with 5 types of laryngoscopy systems. Pathology was the gold standard to
identify malignant and benign vocal lesions. Results: Among 89 cases of
the malignant group, the classifier was able to evaluate the laryngeal
carcinoma in 66 patients (74.16%, sensitivity), while the classifier
was able to assess the benign laryngeal lesion in 503 cases among 640
cases of the benign group (78.59%, specificity). Furthermore, the
CNN-based classifier achieved an overall accuracy of 78.05% with a
95.63% negative prediction for the testing dataset. Conclusion: This
automatic diagnostic system has the potential to assist clinical
laryngeal carcinoma diagnosis, which may improve and standardize the
diagnostic capacity of endoscopists using different laryngoscopes.