Anastomotic leakage is a serious and life-threatening complication after anterior resection in patients with rectal cancer, and temporary ileostomy was introduced to reduce the serious consequences due to anastomotic leakage. However, whether a temporary ileostomy is applied in the surgery depends on the surgeon's experience, and there are no clinical guidelines to follow. Recently, artificial intelligence has widely been applied in medical field and produced some exciting results, and we have developed a high-performance artificial intelligence model based on 2369 rectal cancer patients, which showed good discrimination of anastomotic leakage and may reduce the temporary ileostomy rate. Hence, this randomized controlled trail will evaluate the artificial intelligence model for guiding surgical decision-making of performing a temporary ileostomy in patients with rectal cancer who receive anterior resection.
This study will evaluate whether artificial intelligence technique reduces the temporary ileostomy rate in patients with rectal cancer who receive anterior resection.