Toward Precision Diagnosis of Otitis Media: Introducing A Novel EARnet-AR Model

Otitis media represents inflammation or infection of the middle ear, often stemming from colds, sore throats, or respiratory infections. To address diagnostic challenges, this study introduces the EARnet-AR method, a novel advanced approach for automatically classifying otoscope tympanic membrane images. We employed 1100 otoscopic augmented images were utilized to conduct this research. To enhance the clarity and accuracy of otoscopic images, our research incorporated median filtering, an effective noise reduction technique, and gamma correction to adjust the image's luminance, ensuring a more consistent visual representation. In our initial evaluations, we tested the capabilities of five renowned pre-trained models using a comprehensive set of evaluation metrics, including accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, f1-score, FPR, and FNR. The confusion matrices also detailed the model's capabilities in classifying each specific ear condition. Moreover, our proposed novel model EARnet-AR, enriched with Attention and RNN features, surpasses the other models, achieving training, testing and validation accuracies of 97.5%, 96.0%, and 96.5%, respectively. With such precise diagnostic tools, medical professionals can potentially achieve more timely and accurate treatments, enhancing patient care and outcomes in otitis media cases.