Automatic eye localization for hospitalized infants and children using convolutional neural networks

Abstract

BackgroundReliable localization and tracking of the eye region in the pediatric hospital environment is a significant challenge for clinical decision support and patient monitoring applications. Existing work in eye localization achieves high performance on adult datasets but performs poorly in the busy pediatric hospital environment, where face appearance varies because of age, position and the presence of medical equipment. MethodsWe developed two new datasets: a training dataset using public image data from internet searches, and a test dataset using 59 recordings of patients in a pediatric intensive care unit. We trained two eye localization models, using the Faster R-CNN algorithm to fine-tune a pre-trained ResNet base network, and evaluated them using the images from the pediatric ICU. ResultsThe convolutional neural network trained with a combination of adult and child data achieved an 79.7% eye localization rate, significantly higher than the model trained on adult data alone. With additional pre-processing to equalize image contrast, the localization rate rises to 84%. ConclusionThe results demonstrate the potential of convolutional neural networks for eye localization and tracking in a pediatric ICU setting, even when training data is limited. We obtained significant performance gains by adding task-specific images to the training dataset, highlighting the need for custom models and datasets for specialized applications like pediatric patient monitoring. The moderate size of our added training dataset shows that it is feasible to develop an internal training dataset for clinical computer vision applications, and apply it with transfer learning to fine-tune existing pre-trained models.