Innovative Approaches to Clinical Diagnosis: Transfer Learning in Facial Image Classification for Celiac Disease Identification

Abstract

Background: Celiac disease arises from gluten consumption and shares symptoms with other conditions, leading to delayed diagnosis. Untreated celiac disease heightens the risk of autoimmune disorders, neurological issues, and certain cancers like lymphoma while also impacting skin health due to intestinal disruptions. This study uses facial photos to distinguish individuals with celiac disease from those without. Surprisingly, there is a lack of research involving transfer learning for this purpose despite its benefits such as faster training, enhanced performance, and reduced overfitting. While numerous studies exist on endoscopic intestinal photo classification and few have explored the link between facial morphology measurements and celiac disease, none has concentrated on diagnosing celiac disease through facial photo classification. Methods: This study sought to apply transfer learning techniques with VGG16 to address a gap in research by identifying distinct facial features that differentiate patients with celiac disease from healthy individuals. A dataset containing total 200 adult facial images of individuals with and without celiac condition was utilized. Half of the dataset comprised a ratio of 70% females to 30% males with celiac condition, and the rest of half has 60% females to 40% males without celiac condition. Among those with celiac condition, 28 were newly diagnosed and 72 were previously diagnosed, with 25 not adhering to a gluten-free diet and 47 partially adhering to such a diet. Results: Utilizing transfer learning, the model achieved a 73% accuracy in classifying facial images of patients during testing, with corresponding precision, recall, and F1-score values of 0.54, 0.56, and 0.52 respectively. Training involved 50,178 parameters, showcasing the model's efficacy in diagnostic image analysis. Conclusions: The model correctly classified approximately three-quarters of the test images. While this is a reasonable level of accuracy, it also suggests that there is room for improvement as the dataset contains images that are inherently difficult to classify even for human. Increasing the proportion of newly diagnosed patients in the dataset and expanding the dataset size could have notably improved the model's efficacy. Despite being the first study in this field, further refinement holds promise for the development of a diagnostic tool for celiac disease using transfer learning in medical image analysis, addressing the lack of prior studies in this area.