DKFD: Optimizing Common Pediatric Dermatoses Detection with Novel Loss Function and Post-Processing

• Published in: Applied sciences Vol. 13; no. 10; p. 5958
• Main Authors: Fan, Dandan, Li, Hui, Chen, Mei, Liang, Qingqing, Xu, Huarong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.05.2023
• Subjects: Accuracy; Algorithms; Artificial intelligence; Classification; Collaboration; common pediatric dermatoses; Data augmentation; Datasets; Dermatitis; Dermatology; DK_Loss; Entropy (Information theory); Fliter_nms; Image processing; Image quality; images dataset; Medical imaging; Neural networks; object detection; Pediatric dermatology; Pediatrics; Signs and symptoms; Skin diseases; Technology; Telematics
• ISSN: 2076-3417; 2076-3417
• DOI: 10.3390/app13105958

Using appropriate classification and recognition technology can help physicians make clinical diagnoses and decisions more effectively as a result of the ongoing development of artificial intelligence technology in the medical field. There are currently a number of issues with the detection of common pediatric dermatoses, including the challenge of image collection, the low resolution of some collected images, the intra-class variability and inter-class similarity of disease symptoms, and the mixing of disease symptom detection results. To resolve these problems, we first introduced the Random Online Data Augmentation and Selective Image Super-Resolution Reconstruction (RDA-SSR) method, which successfully avoids overfitting in training, to address the issue of the small dataset and low resolution of collected images, increase the number of images, and improve the image quality. Second, for the issue of an imbalance between difficult and simple samples, which is brought on by the variation within and between classes of disease signs during distinct disease phases. By increasing the loss contribution of hard samples for classification on the basis of the cross-entropy, we propose the DK_Loss loss function for two-stage object detection, allowing the model to concentrate more on the learning of hard samples. Third, in order to reduce redundancy and improve detection precision, we propose the Fliter_nms post-processing method for the intermingling of detection results based on the NMS algorithm. We created the CPD-10 image dataset for common pediatric dermatoses and used the Faster R-CNN network training findings as a benchmark. The experimental results show that the RDA-SSR technique, while needing a similar collection of parameters, can improve mAP by more than 4%. Furthermore, experiments were conducted over the CPD-10 dataset and PASCAL VOC2007 dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of DK_Loss over the two-stage object detection algorithm, and the results of cross-entropy loss-function-based training are used as baselines. The findings demonstrated that, with DK_Loss taken into account, its mAP is 1–2% above the baseline. Furthermore, the experiments confirmed that the Fliter_nms post-processing method can also improve model precision.