A novel YOLOv3-arch model for identifying cholelithiasis and classifying gallstones on CT images

Locating diseases precisely from medical images, like ultrasonic and CT images, have been one of the most challenging problems in medical image analysis. In recent years, the vigorous development of deep learning models have greatly improved the accuracy in disease location on medical images. However, there are few artificial intelligent methods for identifying cholelithiasis and classifying gallstones on CT images, since no open source CT images dataset of cholelithiasis and gallstones is available for training the models and verifying their performance. In this paper, we build up the first medical image dataset of cholelithiasis by collecting 223846 CT images with gallstone of 1369 patients. With these CT images, a neural network is trained to “pick up” CT images of high quality as training set, and then a novel Yolo neural network, named Yolov3-arch neural network, is proposed to identify cholelithiasis and classify gallstones on CT images. Identification and classification accuracies are obtained by 10-fold cross-validations. It is obtained that our Yolov3-arch model is with average accuracy 92.7% in identifying granular gallstones and average accuracy 80.3% in identifying muddy gallstones. This achieves 3.5% and 8% improvements in identifying granular and muddy gallstones to general Yolo v3 model, respectively. Also, the average cholelithiasis identifying accuracy is improved to 86.50% from 80.75%. Meanwhile, our method can reduce the misdiagnosis rate of negative samples by the object detection model.