DETECTION OF CHRONIC VENOUS INSUFFICIENCY CONDITION USING TRANSFER LEARNING WITH CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS BASED ON THERMAL IMAGES

Chronic Venous Insufficiency (CVI) is a venous incompetence condition that leads to improper blood circulation from the lower limbs towards the heart. This occurs as a result of blood pooling in the veins of the leg, resulting in twisted, dilated, and tortuous veins. Aging, obesity, prolonged standing or sitting, and lack of mobility are all important causes of the occurrence of this chronic disease. The cost of CVI diagnosis and treatment is extremely high. Infrared thermographic image analysis is used for early detection and reduces the cost of diagnosis. Deep learning (DL) techniques play an important role in early prediction and may aid clinicians in diagnosing CVI. An automated classification model will assist the physician in making a precise diagnosis of the abnormal vein and treating the patient according to the severity of the condition. There is a need for a model that can perform successful classification without the need for pre-processing when compared to the traditional machine learning (ML) methods that depend on ideal manual feature extraction to achieve optimal outcomes. In this research, we recommend the customized DenseNet-121 architecture for CVI detection and compare it with other advanced DL models to determine its efficacy. DenseNet-121 and other pre-trained convolutional neural network models, including EfficientNetB0 and Inception_v3, were trained using a transfer learning strategy. The experimental findings indicate that the proposed modified DenseNet-121 model outperformed other classical methods. The reported results provide evidence of the robustness of the suggested method in addition to the high accuracy that it possessed, as shown by the overall testing accuracy of 97.4%. Thus, this study can be considered as a non-invasive and cost-effective approach for diagnosing chronic venous insufficiency condition in lower extremity.