Abstract
The study aimed to develop and validate a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based deep learning method for automatic diagnosis and graduation of skin frostbite. A dataset of 71 annotated images was used for the training, the validation, and the testing based on ResNet-50 model. The performances were evaluated with the test set. The diagnosis and graduation performance of our approach was compared with two residents from burns department. The approach correctly identified all the frostbite of IV (18/18, 100%), but with respectively 1 mistake in the diagnosis of degree I (29/30, 96.67%), II (28/29, 96.55%) and III (37/38, 97.37%). The accuracy of the approach on the whole test set was 97.39% (112/115). The accuracy of the two residents were respectively 77.39% and 73.04%. Weighted Kappa of 0.583 indicates good reliability between the two residents (P = .445). Kendall's coefficient of concordance is 0.326 (P = .548), indicating differences in accuracy between the approach and the two residents. Our approach based on CNNs demonstrated an encouraging performance for the automatic diagnosis and graduation of skin frostbite, with higher accuracy and efficiency.