Enhancing Intelligent Anemia Detection via Unifying Global and Local Views of Conjunctiva Image with Two-Branch Neural Networks

Abstract

Anemia is one of the most widespread clinical symptoms all over the world, which could bring adverse effects on people's daily life and work. Considering the universality of anemia detection and the inconvenience of traditional blood testing methods, many deep learning detection methods based on image recognition have been developed in recent years, including the methods of anemia detection with individuals’ images of conjunctiva. However, existing methods using one single conjunctiva image could not reach comparable accuracy in anemia detection in many real-world application scenarios. To enhance intelligent anemia detection using conjunctiva images, we proposed a new algorithmic framework which could make full use of the data information contained in the image. To be concrete, we proposed to fully explore the global and local information in the image, and adopted a two-branch neural network architecture to unify the information of these two aspects. Compared with the existing methods, our method can fully explore the information contained in a single conjunctiva image and achieve more reliable anemia detection effect. Compared with other existing methods, the experimental results verified the effectiveness of the new algorithm.