Deep Learning for Classification of Pediatric Otitis Media

Objectives/Hypothesis To create a new strategy for monitoring pediatric otitis media (OM), we developed a brief, reliable, and objective method for automated classification using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with images from otoscope. Study Design Prospective study. Methods An otoscopic image classifier for pediatric OM was built upon the idea of deep learning and transfer learning using the two most widely used CNN architectures named Xception and MobileNet‐V2. Otoscopic images, including acute otitis media (AOM), otitis media with effusion (OME), and normal ears were obtained from our institution. Among qualified otoendoscopic images, 10,703 images were used for training, and 1,500 images were used for testing. In addition, 102 images captured by smartphone with WI‐FI connected otoscope were used as a prospective test set to evaluate the model for home screening and monitoring. Results For all diagnoses combined in the test set, the Xception model and the MobileNet‐V2 model had similar overall accuracies of 97.45% (95% CI 96.81%–97.94%) and 95.72% (95% CI 95.12%–96.16%). The overall accuracies of two models with smartphone images were 90.66% (95% CI 90.21%–90.98%) and 88.56% (95% CI 87.86%–90.05%). The class activation map results showed that the extracted features of smartphone images were the same as those of otoendoscopic images. Conclusions We have developed deep learning algorithms for the successfully automated classification of pediatric AOM and OME with otoscopic images. With a smartphone‐enabled wireless otoscope, artificial intelligence may assist parents in early detection and continuous monitoring at home to decrease the visit frequencies. Level of Evidence NA Laryngoscope , 131:E2344–E2351, 2021