Building an Otoscopic screening prototype tool using deep learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Otologic diseases are often difficult to diagnose accurately for primary care providers. Deep learning methods have been applied with great success in many areas of medicine, often outperforming well trained human observers. The aim of this work was to develop and evaluate an automatic software prototype to identify otologic abnormalities using a deep convolutional neural network. MATERIAL AND METHODS: A database of 734 unique otoscopic images of various ear pathologies, including 63 cerumen impactions, 120 tympanostomy tubes, and 346 normal tympanic membranes were acquired. 80% of the images were used for the training of a convolutional neural network and the remaining 20% were used for algorithm validation. Image augmentation was employed on the training dataset to increase the number of training images. The general network architecture consisted of three convolutional layers plus batch normalization and dropout layers to avoid over fitting. RESULTS: The validation based on 45 datasets not used for model training revealed that the proposed deep convolutional neural network is capable of identifying and differentiating between normal tympanic membranes, tympanostomy tubes, and cerumen impactions with an overall accuracy of 84.4%. CONCLUSION: Our study shows that deep convolutional neural networks hold immense potential as a diagnostic adjunct for otologic disease management.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".