Detection of Gallbladder Disease Types Using Deep Learning: An Informative Medical Method

Diagnostics (Basel). 2023 May 15;13(10):1744. doi: 10.3390/diagnostics13101744.

Abstract

Nowadays, despite all the conducted research and the provided efforts in advancing the healthcare sector, there is a strong need to rapidly and efficiently diagnose various diseases. The complexity of some disease mechanisms on one side and the dramatic life-saving potential on the other side raise big challenges for the development of tools for the early detection and diagnosis of diseases. Deep learning (DL), an area of artificial intelligence (AI), can be an informative medical tomography method that can aid in the early diagnosis of gallbladder (GB) disease based on ultrasound images (UI). Many researchers considered the classification of only one disease of the GB. In this work, we successfully managed to apply a deep neural network (DNN)-based classification model to a rich built database in order to detect nine diseases at once and to determine the type of disease using UI. In the first step, we built a balanced database composed of 10,692 UI of the GB organ from 1782 patients. These images were carefully collected from three hospitals over roughly three years and then classified by professionals. In the second step, we preprocessed and enhanced the dataset images in order to achieve the segmentation step. Finally, we applied and then compared four DNN models to analyze and classify these images in order to detect nine GB disease types. All the models produced good results in detecting GB diseases; the best was the MobileNet model, with an accuracy of 98.35%.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; deep learning; deep neural network; diagnosis; gallbladder; ultrasound images.

Grants and funding

This research received no external funding.