Automated Detection of Extrahepatic Bile Duct Stones on Intraoperative Cholangiography Using Deep Learning
Journal:
medRxiv
Published Date:
Aug 24, 2026
Abstract
Objective: To evaluate the case-level performance of deep-learning segmentation models for detecting extrahepatic bile duct stones on representative intraoperative cholangiography images (IOC) and to characterize the completeness of individual-stone localization. Background: Retained bile duct stones can cause biliary obstruction, cholangitis, and pancreatitis. However false-positive interpretation of filling defects may prompt additional downstream procedures. Computer vision has been applied to biliary anatomy recognition and IOC adequacy assessment, but patient-level stone detection and individual-stone localization remain insufficiently studyed. Methods: Representative IOC images were annotated for extrahepatic biliary anatomy and stones, with case-level stone status established using a composite clinical reference standard. Two deep-learning models were developed to delineate the common bile duct and common hepatic duct and to detect and localize stones. Case-level diagnostic performance was evaluated against the composite clinical reference standard, and individual-stone localization was evaluated against expert-reviewed annotations. Results: On the held-out 125 patients test set, MiT-B2-UNet identified 23 of 25 stone-positive cases and 95 of 100 stone-negative cases, corresponding to a sensitivity of 0.920, specificity of 0.950, and AUC of 0.986. nnU-Net identified 19 of 25 stone-positive cases and 98 of 100 stone-negative cases, corresponding to a sensitivity of 0.760, specificity of 0.980, and AUC of 0.959. At the individual-stone level, MiT-B2-UNet and nnU-Net localized 31 of 59 and 25 of 59 annotated stones, respectively; all annotated stones were localized in 13 of 25 and 12 of 25 stone-positive cases. Conclusions: Deep-learning models can identify stone-positive IOC cases and localize individual stones. This technology may help inte
