Artificial intelligence based pharyngitis detection using smartphone

Abstract

Pharyngitis is defined as inflammation in the back wall of the nose and mouth cavity. Mobile technologies have received an increasing amount of attention in the recent global epidemic due to their advantage in pre-diagnosis of diseases that show respiratory symptoms such as pharyngitis. In this study, we propose a custom-designed Android application that offers pharyngitis detection based on artificial intelligence using throat images. Deep learning, a subset of artificial intelligence, allows being embedded in Android applications which leads to be giving fast and highly accurate results without an internet connection. Popular deep learning architectures including Inception-v3, MobileNet-v2, Xception, VGG16, VGG19 and ResNet50, have been trained to evaluate their performance in pharyngitis detection. Detection of pharyngitis for the images could be performed after they were verified as inner of the mouth. Therefore, two sequential classifiers were designed. The first classifiers were trained with the MSCOCO dataset, while the second-ranked classifiers were trained with the dataset, including 131 pharyngitis and 208 non-pharyngitis throat images augmented with specific methods. Among the above architectures, ResNet50 showed the highest performance with 96.20% accuracy. By embedding the ResNet50 architecture into our custom-designed Android application named ‘Farenjit Tanımlama’, users will be able to pre-diagnose in a practical way, thus contributing to reducing the burden on the health system caused by the epidemic.