Deep learning-based allergic rhinitis diagnosis using nasal endoscopy images

Allergic rhinitis typically has edematous and pale turbinates or erythematous and inflamed turbinates. While traditional approaches include using skin prick tests (SPT) to determine the presence of AR, It is often not related to actual symptoms, and it is an invasive test. We use deep learning to analyze nasal endoscopy images to investigate a quantitative method for diagnosing allergic rhinitis. Traditional machine learning-based diagnostic techniques have relied on structured clinical datasets featuring statistical data such as demographic characteristics, symptom severity, and clinical test results. In contrast, we propose a novel approach to use endoscopy image data to analyze the color distribution in the inferior turbinate region of patients with allergic rhinitis using the CIE-Lab color space and extract the adaptive histogram features that are used to explore and find suitable feature extraction methods and deep learning model architectures. Our proposed model achieves a promising diagnostic accuracy of 90.80% for images exhibiting AR symptoms. Future research will expand the dataset to include a broader spectrum of symptomatic and asymptomatic images to enhance model robustness and investigate the potential of optical analysis as a non-invasive diagnostic method for AR. This study introduced a novel approach to diagnosing allergic rhinitis using nasal endoscopy images. Our approach analyzed the color distribution of the inferior turbinates within the LAB color space, extracted important features from endoscopy images using both CNN feature extraction and histograms, and performed classification through SVM and fully connected classifiers.