Colorectal cancer is a leading cause of death. Colonoscopy is the criterion standard for detection and removal of precancerous lesions and has been shown to reduce mortality. The polyp miss rate during colonoscopies is 22% to 28%. DEEP DEtection of Elusive Polyps (DEEP²) is a new polyp detection system based on deep learning, which alerts the operator in real-time to the presence and location of polyps. The primary outcome was the performance of DEEP² on the detection of elusive polyps. Link More

The DEEP² system was trained on 3,611 hours of colonoscopy videos derived from 2 sources, and was validated on a set comprising 1,393 hours, from a third unrelated source. The ground truth labeling was provided by offline gastroenterologist annotators, who were able to watch the video in slow-motion and pause/rewind as required. To assess the applicability, stability, user experience and in order to obtain some preliminary data on performance in a real-life scenario, a preliminary prospective clinical validation study was performed, comprising 100 procedures (clinicaltrial.gov ID: NCT04693078).