The Helicobacter pylori AI-clinician harnesses artificial intelligence to personalise H. pylori treatment recommendations
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Published version
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Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is the most common carcinogenic pathogen globally and the leading cause of gastric cancer. Here, we develop a reinforcement learning-based AI Clinician system to personalise treatment selection and evaluate its ability to improve eradication success compared to clinician-prescribed therapies. The model is trained and internally validated on 38,049 patients from the retrospective European Registry on Helicobacter pylori Management (Hp-EuReg), using independent state deep Q-learning (isDQN) to recommend optimal therapies based on patient characteristics such as age, sex, antibiotic allergies, country, and pre-treatment indication. In internal validation using real-world Hp-EuReg data, AI-recommended therapies achieve a 94.1% success rate (95% CI: 93.2–95.0%) versus 88.1% (95% CI: 87.7–88.4%) for clinician-prescribed therapies not aligned with AI suggestions—an improvement of 6.0%. Results are replicated in an external validation cohort (n = 7186), confirming generalisability. The AI system identifies optimal treatment strategies in key subgroups: 65% (n = 24,923) are recommended bismuth-based therapies, and 15% (n = 5898) non-bismuth quadruple therapies. Random forest modelling identifies region and concurrent medications as patient-specific drivers of AI recommendations. With nearly half the global population likely to contract H. pylori, this approach lays the foundation for future prospective clinical validation and shows the potential of AI to support clinical decision-making, enhance outcomes, and reduce gastric cancer burden.
Date Issued
2025-07-14
Date Acceptance
2025-06-19
Citation
Nature Communications, 2025, 16
ISSN
2041-1723
Publisher
Nature Portfolio
Journal / Book Title
Nature Communications
Volume
16
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Identifier
10.1038/s41467-025-61329-5
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
6472