Differentiating localized autoimmune pancreatitis and pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma using endoscopic ultrasound images with deep learning

Abstract Objectives Localized autoimmune pancreatitis is difficult to differentiate from pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma on endoscopic ultrasound images. In recent years, deep learning methods have improved the diagnosis of diseases. Hence, we developed a special cross‐validation framework to search for effective methodologies of deep learning in distinguishing autoimmune pancreatitis from pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma on endoscopic ultrasound images. Methods Data from 24 patients diagnosed with localized autoimmune pancreatitis (8751 images) and 61 patients diagnosed with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (20,584 images) were collected from 2016 to 2022. We applied transfer learning to a convolutional neural network called ResNet152, together with our innovative imaging method contributing to data augmentation and temporal data process. We divided patients into five groups according to different factors for 5‐fold cross‐validation, where the ordered and balanced datasets were created for the performance evaluations. Results ResNet152 surpassed the endoscopists in all evaluation metrics with almost all datasets. Interestingly, when the dataset is balanced according to the factor of the endoscopists’ diagnostic accuracy, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve and accuracy were highest at 0.85 and 0.80, respectively. Conclusions It is deduced that image features useful for ResNet152 correlate with those used by endoscopists for their diagnoses. This finding may contribute to sample‐efficient dataset preparation to train convolutional neural networks for endoscopic ultrasonography‐imaging diagnosis.