Classification of Mastoid Air Cells by CT Scan Images Using Deep Learning Method

AbstractPurposeMastoid abnormalities show different types of ear illnesses, however inadequacy of experts and low accuracy of diagnostic demand a new approach to detect these abnormalities and reduce human mistakes. The manual analysis of mastoid CT scans is time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this paper the first and robust deep learning-based approaches is introduced to diagnose mastoid abnormalities using a large database of CT images obtained in the clinical center with remarkable accuracy.MethodsIn this paper, mastoid abnormalities are classified using the Xception based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, with optimizer Adamax into five categories (Complete pneumatized, Opacification in pneumatization, Partial pneumatization, Opacification in partial pneumatization, None pneumatized). For this reason, a total of 24,800 slides of 152 patients were selected that include the mastoid from most upper to the lowest part of the middle ear cavity to complete the construction of the proposed deep neural network model.ResultsThe proposed model had the best accuracy of 87.80% (based on grader 1) and 88.44% (based on grader 2) on the 20th epoch and 87.70% (based on grader 1) and 87.56% (based on grader 2) on average and also significantly faster than other types of implemented architectures in terms of the computer running time (in seconds). The 99% confidence interval of the average accuracy was 0.012 which means that the true accuracy is 87.80% and 87.56% ± 1.2% that indicates the power of the model.ConclusionsThe manual analysis of ear cavity CT scans is often time-consuming and prone to errors due to various inter- or intra operator variability studies. The proposed method can be used to automatically analyze the middle ear cavity to classify mastoid abnormalities, which is markedly faster than most types of models with the highest accuracy.