Classification of OME with Eardrum Otoendoscopic Images Using Hybrid-Based Deep Models, NCA, and Gaussian Method

Otitis media with effusion (OME) is defined as a middle ear disease that occurs with the accumulation of fluid in the posterior part of the eardrum, usually without any symptoms. When OME disease is not treated, some negative consequences arise that deeply affect the education, social and cultural life of the patient. OME disease is a difficult issue to diagnose by specialists. In this article, autoendoscopic images of the eardrum have been classified using deep learning methods to help specialists in the diagnosis of OME. In this study, a hybrid deep model based on artificial intelligence is proposed. In the proposed hybrid model, feature maps were obtained using Efficientnetb0 and Densenet201 architectures from both the original dataset and the improved dataset using the gaussian method. Then, the merging process was applied to these feature maps. Unnecessary features are eliminated by applying NCA dimension reduction to the combined feature map. The most valuable features obtained at the end of the optimization process are classified in different machine learning classifiers. The proposed model reached a very competitive accuracy value of 98.20% in the SVM classifier.