Application of artificial intelligence models for detecting the pterygium that requires surgical treatment based on anterior segment images

Background and aim A pterygium is a common ocular surface disease, which not only affects facial appearance but can also grow into the tissue layer, causing astigmatism and vision loss. In this study, an artificial intelligence model was developed for detecting the pterygium that requires surgical treatment. The model was designed using ensemble deep learning (DL). Methods A total of 172 anterior segment images of pterygia were obtained from the Jiangxi Provincial People’s Hospital (China) between 2017 and 2022. They were divided by a senior ophthalmologist into the non-surgery group and the surgery group. An artificial intelligence model was then developed based on ensemble DL, which was integrated with four benchmark models: the Resnet18, Alexnet, Googlenet, and Vgg11 model, for detecting the pterygium that requires surgical treatment, and Grad-CAM was used to visualize the DL process. Finally, the performance of the ensemble DL model was compared with the classical Resnet18 model, Alexnet model, Googlenet model, and Vgg11 model. Results The accuracy and area under the curve (AUC) of the ensemble DL model was higher than all of the other models. In the training set, the accuracy and AUC of the ensemble model was 94.20% and 0.978, respectively. In the testing set, the accuracy and AUC of the ensemble model was 94.12% and 0.980, respectively. Conclusion This study indicates that this ensemble DL model, coupled with the anterior segment images in our study, might be an automated and cost-saving alternative for detection of the pterygia that require surgery.