PCONet: A Convolutional Neural Network Architecture to Detect Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) from Ovarian Ultrasound Images

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is an endrocrinological dysfunction prevalent among women of reproductive age. PCOS is a combination of syndromes caused by an excess of androgens — a group of sex hormones — in women. Syndromes including acne, alopecia, hirsutism, hyperandrogenaemia, oligoovulation, etc. are caused by PCOS. It is also a major cause of female infertility. An estimated 15% of reproductive-aged women are affected by PCOS globally. The necessity of detecting PCOS early due to the severity of its deleterious effects cannot be overstated. In this paper, we have developed PCONet - a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) - to detect polycistic ovary from ovarian ultrasound images. We have also fine tuned InceptionV3 - a pretrained convolutional neural network of 45 layers - by utilizing the transfer learning method to classify polcystic ovarian ultrasound images. We have compared these two models on various quantitative performance evaluation parameters and demonstrated that PCONet is the superior one among these two with an accuracy of 98.12%, whereas the fine tuned InceptionV3 showcased an accuracy of 96.56% on test images.