Fungal Skin Disease Classification Using the Convolutional Neural Network.

Skin is the outer cover of our body, which protects vital organs from harm. This important body part is often affected by a series of infections caused by fungus, bacteria, viruses, allergies, and dust. Millions of people suffer from skin diseases. It is one of the common causes of infection in sub-Saharan Africa. Skin disease can also be the cause of stigma and discrimination. Early and accurate diagnosis of skin disease can be vital for effective treatment. Laser and photonics-based technologies are used for the diagnosis of skin disease. These technologies are expensive and not affordable, especially for resource-limited countries like Ethiopia. Hence, image-based methods can be effective in reducing cost and time. There are previous studies on image-based diagnosis for skin disease. However, there are few scientific studies on tinea pedis and tinea corporis. In this study, the convolution neural network (CNN) has been used to classify fungal skin disease. The classification was carried out on the four most common fungal skin diseases: tinea pedis, tinea capitis, tinea corporis, and tinea unguium. The dataset consisted of a total of 407 fungal skin lesions collected from Dr. Gerbi Medium Clinic, Jimma, Ethiopia. Normalization of image size, conversion of RGB to grayscale, and balancing the intensity of the image have been carried out. Images were normalized to three sizes: 120 × 120, 150 × 150, and 224 × 224. Then, augmentation was applied. The developed model classified the four common fungal skin diseases with 93.3% accuracy. Comparisons were made with similar CNN architectures: MobileNetV2 and ResNet 50, and the proposed model was superior to both. This study may be an important addition to the very limited work on the detection of fungal skin disease. It can be used to build an automated image-based screening system for dermatology at an initial stage.

Neonatal Disease Prediction Using Machine Learning Techniques.

Neonatal diseases are among the main causes of morbidity and a significant contributor to underfive mortality in the world. There is an increase in understanding of the pathophysiology of the diseases and the implementation of different strategies to minimize their burden. However, improvements in outcomes are not adequate. Limited success is due to different factors, including the similarity of symptoms, which can lead to misdiagnosis, and the inability to detect early for timely intervention. In resource-limited countries like Ethiopia, the challenge is more severe. Low access to diagnosis and treatment due to the inadequacy of neonatal health professionals is one of the shortcomings. Due to the shortage of medical facilities, many neonatal health professionals are forced to decide the type of disease only based on interviews. They may not have a complete picture of all variables that have a contributing effect on neonatal disease from the interview. This can make the diagnosis inconclusive and may lead to a misdiagnosis. Machine learning has great potential for early prediction if relevant historical data is available. We have applied a classification stacking model for the following four main neonatal diseases: sepsis, birth asphyxia, necrotizing enter colitis (NEC), and respiratory distress syndrome. These diseases account for 75% of neonatal deaths. The dataset has been obtained from the Asella Comprehensive Hospital. It has been collected between 2018 and 2021. The developed stacking model was compared to three related machine-learning models XGBoost (XGB), Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The proposed stacking model outperformed the other models, with an accuracy of 97.04%. We believe that this will contribute to the early detection and accurate diagnosis of neonatal diseases, especially for resource-limited health facilities.