Feasibility Study of an Automated Carbohydrate Estimation System Using Thai Food Images in Comparison With Estimation by Dietitians

Carbohydrate counting is essential for well-controlled blood glucose in people with type 1 diabetes, but to perform it precisely is challenging, especially for Thai foods. Consequently, we developed a deep learning-based system for automatic carbohydrate counting using Thai food images taken from smartphones. The newly constructed Thai food image dataset contained 256,178 ingredient objects with measured weight for 175 food categories among 75,232 images. These were used to train object detector and weight estimator algorithms. After training, the system had a Top-1 accuracy of 80.9% and a root mean square error (RMSE) for carbohydrate estimation of <10 g in the test dataset. Another set of 20 images, which contained 48 food items in total, was used to compare the accuracy of carbohydrate estimations between measured weight, system estimation, and eight experienced registered dietitians (RDs). System estimation error was 4%, while estimation errors from nearest, lowest, and highest carbohydrate among RDs were 0.7, 25.5, and 7.6%, respectively. The RMSE for carbohydrate estimations of the system and the lowest RD were 9.4 and 10.2, respectively. The system could perform with an estimation error of <10 g for 13/20 images, which placed it third behind only two of the best performing RDs: RD1 (15/20 images) and RD5 (14/20 images). Hence, the system was satisfactory in terms of accurately estimating carbohydrate content, with results being comparable with those of experienced dietitians.