System and method to diagnose conjunctivitis in the eye of a user

Heliyon. 2024 Aug 17;10(17):e36248. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e36248. eCollection 2024 Sep 15.

Abstract

This Proposed work explores how machine learning can be used to diagnose conjunctivitis, a common eye ailment. The main goal of the study is to capture eye images using camera-based systems, perform image pre-processing, and employ image segmentation techniques, particularly the UNet++ and U-net models. Additionally, the study involves extracting features from the relevant areas within the segmented images and using Convolutional Neural Networks for classification. All this is carried out using TensorFlow, a well-known machine-learning platform. The research involves thorough training and assessment of both the UNet and U-net++ segmentation models. A comprehensive analysis is conducted, focusing on their accuracy and performance. The study goes further to evaluate these models using both the UBIRIS dataset and a custom dataset created for this specific research. The experimental results emphasize a substantial improvement in the quality of segmentation achieved by the U-net++ model, the model achieved an overall accuracy of 97.07. Furthermore, the UNet++ architecture displays better accuracy in comparison to the traditional U-net model. These outcomes highlight the potential of U-net++ as a valuable advancement in the field of machine learning-based conjunctivitis diagnosis.

Keywords: Convolutional neural network; Image recognition; Sclera segmentation; Segmentation; U-net architecture.