The Development and Performance of a Machine Learning Based Mobile Platform for Visually Determining the Etiology of Penile Pathology

Machine-learning algorithms can facilitate low-cost, user-guided visual diagnostic platforms for addressing disparities in access to sexual health services. We developed a clinical image dataset using original and augmented images for five penile diseases: herpes eruption, syphilitic chancres, penile candidiasis, penile cancer, and genital warts. We used a U-net architecture model for semantic pixel segmentation into background or subject image, the Inception-ResNet version 2 neural architecture to classify each pixel as diseased or non-diseased, and a salience map using GradCAM++. We trained the model on a random 91% sample of the image database using 150 epochs per image, and evaluated the model on the remaining 9% of images, assessing recall (or sensitivity), precision, specificity, and F1-score (accuracy). Of the 239 images in the validation dataset, 45 (18.8%) were of genital warts, 43 (18.0%) were of HSV infection, 29 (12.1%) were of penile cancer, 40 (16.7%) were of penile candidiasis, 37 (15.5%) were of syphilitic chancres, and 45 (18.8%) were of non-diseased penises. The overall accuracy of the model for correctly classifying the diseased image was 0.944. Between July 1st and October 1st 2023, there were 2,640 unique users of the mobile platform. Among a random sample of submissions (n=437), 271 (62.0%) were from the United States, 64 (14.6%) from Singapore, 41 (9.4%) from Candia, 40 (9.2%) from the United Kingdom, and 21 (4.8%) from Vietnam. The majority (n=277 [63.4%]) were between 18 and 30 years old. We report on the development of a machine-learning model for classifying five penile diseases, which demonstrated excellent performance on a validation dataset. That model is currently in use globally and has the potential to improve access to diagnostic services for penile diseases.

SynthVision -- Harnessing Minimal Input for Maximal Output in Computer Vision Models using Synthetic Image data

Rapid development of disease detection computer vision models is vital in response to urgent medical crises like epidemics or events of bioterrorism. However, traditional data gathering methods are too slow for these scenarios necessitating innovative approaches to generate reliable models quickly from minimal data. We demonstrate our new approach by building a comprehensive computer vision model for detecting Human Papilloma Virus Genital warts using only synthetic data. In our study, we employed a two phase experimental design using diffusion models. In the first phase diffusion models were utilized to generate a large number of diverse synthetic images from 10 HPV guide images explicitly focusing on accurately depicting genital warts. The second phase involved the training and testing vision model using this synthetic dataset. This method aimed to assess the effectiveness of diffusion models in rapidly generating high quality training data and the subsequent impact on the vision model performance in medical image recognition. The study findings revealed significant insights into the performance of the vision model trained on synthetic images generated through diffusion models. The vision model showed exceptional performance in accurately identifying cases of genital warts. It achieved an accuracy rate of 96% underscoring its effectiveness in medical image classification. For HPV cases the model demonstrated a high precision of 99% and a recall of 94%. In normal cases the precision was 95% with an impressive recall of 99%. These metrics indicate the model capability to correctly identify true positive cases and minimize false positives. The model achieved an F1 Score of 96% for HPV cases and 97% for normal cases. The high F1 Score across both categories highlights the balanced nature of the model precision and recall ensuring reliability and robustness in its predictions.