Automated Identification of Cutaneous Leishmaniasis Lesions Using Deep-Learning-Based Artificial Intelligence.

Journal: Biomedicines
Published Date:

Abstract

The polymorphism of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) complicates diagnosis in health care services because lesions may be confused with other dermatoses such as sporotrichosis, paracocidiocomycosis, and venous insufficiency. Automated identification of skin diseases based on deep learning (DL) has been applied to assist diagnosis. In this study, we evaluated the performance of AlexNet, a DL algorithm, to identify pictures of CL lesions in patients from Midwest Brazil. We used a set of 2458 pictures (up to 10 of each lesion) obtained from patients treated between 2015 and 2022 in the Leishmaniasis Clinic at the University Hospital of Brasilia. We divided the picture database into training (80%), internal validation (10%), and testing sets (10%), and trained and tested AlexNet to identify pictures of CL lesions. We performed three simulations and trained AlexNet to differentiate CL from 26 other dermatoses (e.g., chromomycosis, ecthyma, venous insufficiency). We obtained an average accuracy of 95.04% (Confidence Interval 95%: 93.81-96.04), indicating an excellent performance of AlexNet in identifying pictures of CL lesions. We conclude that automated CL identification using AlexNet has the potential to assist clinicians in diagnosing skin lesions. These results contribute to the development of a mobile application to assist in the diagnosis of CL in health care services.

Authors

  • José Fabrício de Carvalho Leal
    Graduate Program in Tropical Medicine, Center for Tropical Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Brasília-UnB, Brasília 70904-970, Brazil.
  • Daniel Holanda Barroso
    Postgraduate Program in Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Brasília-UnB, Brasília 70904-970, Brazil.
  • Natália Santos Trindade
    Laboratory of Medical Parasitology and Vector Biology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Brasília-UnB, Brasília 70904-970, Brazil.
  • Vinícius Lima de Miranda
    Laboratory of Medical Parasitology and Vector Biology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Brasília-UnB, Brasília 70904-970, Brazil.
  • Rodrigo Gurgel-Gonçalves
    Graduate Program in Tropical Medicine, Center for Tropical Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Brasília-UnB, Brasília 70904-970, Brazil.

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