M-CAD: Towards Multi-Categorical Auto Diagnosis of Varied Diseases using Deep Learning

The economic burden and the number of lives lost due to diagnostic errors are higher than ever due to the onset of pandemics and new viruses, Specially in medium and low-economic status nations (including India) are affected heavily in terms of capital and human resources. Due to limited expertise in diagnostic technologies in remote parts of India and many low-economic nations of Africa, autonomous diagnostics can save millions of lives and lower the costs. To accomplish this goal we propose a method that uses modern developments in Deep Learning in semantic segmentation and classification to predict multiple diseases from multiple medical images. To conduct the study we test the model with Dermoscopy images and CT-Scans to predict 8 classes relating to Melanoma cancer, Covid-19 virus and different types of Carcinoma. The setup is tested on largest publicly available ISIC Dermoscopy dataset, 1061 CT-scan images combined for the classification and Segmentation(only for Melanoma). Classification model(M-CAD) is progressively tested by increasing the number of classes and data that it trains on. This pilot study is conducted on a small subset of the complete data, segmentation of Melanoma images obtained an accuracy of 96.6% compared to human expert agreement which is 90.9%. we were able to produce average accuracy of 81.5% and AUC of 0.94 for 6 classes using CT-Scans whereas accuracy and AUC for all the 8 classes is 80.2% and 0.97 respectively. These results were quite promising for a model that classifies different images with no apparent relation at all.