Novel image processing method for detecting strep throat (Streptococcal pharyngitis) using smartphone

Behnam Askarian, Seung Chul Yoo, Jo Woon Chong

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

34 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel strep throat detection method using a smartphone with an add-on gadget. Our smartphone-based strep throat detection method is based on the use of camera and flashlight embedded in a smartphone. The proposed algorithm acquires throat image using a smartphone with a gadget, processes the acquired images using color transformation and color correction algorithms, and finally classifies streptococcal pharyngitis (or strep) throat from healthy throat using machine learning techniques. Our developed gadget was designed to minimize the reflection of light entering the camera sensor. The scope of this paper is confined to binary classification between strep and healthy throats. Specifically, we adopted k-fold validation technique for classification, which finds the best decision boundary from training and validation sets and applies the acquired best decision boundary to the test sets. Experimental results show that our proposed detection method detects strep throats with 93.75% accuracy, 88% specificity, and 87.5% sensitivity on average.

Original languageEnglish
Article number3307
JournalSensors (Switzerland)
Volume19
Issue number15
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Aug 2019

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Keywords

  • Classification
  • Color space
  • Image processing
  • Smartphone
  • Strep throat

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