A Deep Learning Framework for Image-Based Screening of Kawasaki Disease

Kawasaki disease (KD) is a leading cause of acquired heart disease in children and is characterized by the presence of a combination of five clinical signs assessed during the physical examination. Timely treatment of intravenous immunoglobin is needed to prevent coronary artery aneurysm formation, but KD is usually diagnosed when pediatric patients are evaluated by a clinician in the emergency department days after onset. One or more of the five clinical signs usually manifests in pediatric patients prior to ED admission, presenting an opportunity for earlier intervention if families receive guidance to seek medical care as soon as clinical signs are observed along with a fever for at least five days. We present a deep learning framework for a novel screening tool to calculate the relative risk of KD by analyzing images of the five clinical signs. The framework consists of convolutional neural networks to separately calculate the risk for each clinical sign, and a new algorithm to determine what clinical sign is in an image. We achieved a mean accuracy of 90% during 10-fold cross-validation and 88% during external validation for the new algorithm. These results demonstrate the algorithms in the proposed screening tool can be utilized by families to determine if their child should be evaluated by a clinician based on the number of clinical signs consistent with KD.