CNN-based diagnosis models for canine ulcerative keratitis

The purpose of this methodological study was to develop a convolutional neural network (CNN), which is a recently developed deep-learning-based image recognition method, to determine corneal ulcer severity in dogs. The CNN model was trained with images for which corneal ulcer severity (normal, superficial, and deep) were previously classified by veterinary ophthalmologists’ diagnostic evaluations of corneal photographs from patients who visited the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital (VMTH) at Konkuk University and 3 different veterinary ophthalmology specialty hospitals in Korea. The original images (depicting normal corneas (36) and corneas with superficial (47) ulcers, deep (47) ulcers), flipped images (total 520), rotated images (total 520), and both flipped and rotated images (total 1,040) were labeled, learned and evaluated with GoogLeNet, ResNet, and VGGNet models, and the severity of each corneal ulcer image was determined. To accomplish this task, models based on TensorFlow, an open-source software library developed by Google, were used, and the labeled images were converted into TensorFlow record (TFRecord) format. The models were fine-tuned using a CNN model trained on the ImageNet dataset and then used to predict severity. Most of the models achieved accuracies of over 90% when classifying superficial and deep corneal ulcers, and ResNet and VGGNet achieved accuracies over 90% for classifying normal corneas, corneas with superficial ulcers, and corneas with deep ulcers. This study proposes a method to effectively determine corneal ulcer severity in dogs by using a CNN and concludes that multiple image classification models can be used in the veterinary field.