The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in various medical imaging applications has expanded remarkably, and several reports have focused on endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) images of the pancreas. This review briefly summarizes each report in order to help endoscopists better understand and utilize the potential of this rapidly developing AI, after a description of the fundamentals of the AI involved, as is necessary for understanding each study. At first, conventional computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) was used, which extracts and selects features from imaging data using various methods and introduces them into machine learning algorithms as inputs. Deep learning-based CAD utilizing convolutional neural networks has been used; in these approaches, the images themselves are used as inputs, and more information can be analyzed in less time and with higher accuracy. In the field of EUS imaging, although AI is still in its infancy, further research and development of AI applications is expected to contribute to the role of optical biopsy as an alternative to EUS-guided tissue sampling while also improving diagnostic accuracy through double reading with humans and contributing to EUS education.
Keywords: artificial intelligence; computer-aided diagnosis; convolutional neural network; deep learning; deep neural network; endoscopic ultrasound; machine learning; pancreas; pancreatic cancer; support vector machine.