Background/aim: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the clinical significance of visualized area percentage assessment of cleansing score (AAC) and computed assessment of cleansing score (CAC) of these two small bowel cleanliness scores systems for capsule endoscopy (CE).
Materials and methods: The reliability and consistency of the AAC and CAC scores were evaluated by comparing the scores by two examiners (one expert, one without any training in CE). Reliability was determined using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and consistency was determined using the kappa statistic.
Results: The inter-observer agreement was excellent for both the AAC and CAC scores. For AAC, the ICC was 0.791 (95% confidence interval: 0.677-0.868), and for CAC the ICC was 1.000. Using 1.5 as the cutoff, there was no significant difference between AAC and CAC results by the expert examiner (kappa = 0.756, P = 0.000) or the non-expert examiner (kappa = 0.831, P = 0.000). Evaluation of small bowel cleanliness using AAC took 15-30 min, and evaluation using CAC took about 2-3 min. The overall adequacy assessment (OAA) using the AAC was not significantly different between the two examiners (χ2 = 0.586, P = 0.444). There were also no significant differences between the OAA using the AAC and the OAA using the CAC by the expert examiner (χ2 = 1.730, P = 0.188) or the non-expert examiner (χ2 = 1.124, P = 0.289).
Conclusion: Both of these scores for assessment of small bowel cleanliness can be useful in clinical practice, but the CAC is simpler to use.