Carcinoma of esophagus ranks seventh in terms of incidence and sixth in cancer-related mortality in the world, and radical esophagectomy is considered as the basis for comprehensive therapy of locally advanced carcinoma of esophagus.Accurate preoperative determination of lymph node status is crucial to the treatment planning, assessment of life quality and survival time of patients after surgery. However, the rate of missed diagnosis and misdiagnosis of metastatic lymph nodes by traditional imaging methods is high. With the development of artificial intelligence technology and medical image digitization, the medical image analysis method based on artificial intelligence has brought new ideas to the diagnosis and research of lymph node metastasis secondary to carcinoma of esophagus. At present, the texture analysis, radiomics and deep learning are the most widely used technologies. These technologies extract quantitative features from medical images to describe biological information such as tumor characteristics and heterogeneity to guide clinical practice. Therefore, this paper mainly introduced and commented the current status of imaging research on lymph node metastasis of carcinoma of esophagus based on texture analysis, radiomics and deep learning, and prospected the significant research directions in the future with a view to improving the diagnostic level of lymph node metastasis of carcinoma of esophagus in China