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

To develop a machine-learning visual classification algorithm for penile diseases in order to address disparities in access to sexual health services.

We developed an image data set using original and augmented images for 5 penile diseases: herpes lesions, syphilitic chancres, balanitis, penile cancer, and genital warts. We used a U-Net architecture model for semantic pixel segmentation into background or subject image, an Inception-ResNet version 2 neural architecture to classify each pixel as diseased or nondiseased, and a salience map using GradCAM++. We trained the model on a random 91% sample of the images and evaluated the model on the remaining 9%, assessing recall (or sensitivity), precision, specificity, and F1-score. As of July 1st 2022, the model has been in use via a mobile application platform; we assessed application usage between July and October 1, 2023.

Of 239 images in the validation data set, 45 (18.8%) were of genital warts, 43 (18%) were of herpes simplex virus infection (ranging from early vesicles to ulcers), 29 (12.1%) were of penile cancer, 40 (16.7%) were of balanitis, 37 (15.5%) were of syphilitic chancres, and 45 (18.8%) were nondiseased images. The overall accuracy of the model for correctly classifying images was 0.944. There were 2640 unique submissions to the mobile platform; among a random sample (n=437), 271 (62%) were from the United States, 64 (14.6%) from Singapore, 41 (9.4%) from Canada, 40 (9.2%) from the United Kingdom, and 21 (4.8%) from Vietnam.

We report on the development of a machine-learning model for classifying 5 penile diseases, which exhibited excellent performance.