Abstract
Malnutrition is common, especially among older, hospitalised patients, and is associated with higher mortality, longer hospitalisation stays, infections, and loss of muscle mass. It is therefore of utmost importance to employ a proper method for dietary assessment that can be used for the identification and management of malnourished hospitalised patients. In this study, we propose an automated Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based system that receives input images of the meals before and after their consumption and is able to estimate the patient’s energy, carbohydrate, protein, fat, and fatty acids intake. The system jointly segments the images into the different food components and plate types, estimates the volume of each component before and after consumption, and calculates the energy and macronutrient intake for every meal, based on the kitchen’s menu database. Data acquired from an acute geriatric hospital as well as from our previous study were used for the fine-tuning and evaluation of the system. The results from both our system and the hospital’s standard procedure were compared to the estimations of experts. Agreement was better with the system, suggesting that it has the potential to replace standard clinical procedures with a positive impact on time spent directly with the patients.
Highlights
Malnutrition in hospitalised patients is a serious condition with significant consequences on all organ systems
Since the ground truth (GT) was not obtained by weighing the dishes and the meal components, two dietitians and one trained medical student estimated the percentage that was consumed from each food component in every meal, and these estimations were considered as the reference, as this method gives estimations as close to the GT as possible
We presented an automatic, end-to-end, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based system that receives as input RGB-D food images captured on a standardised mount before and after consumption, along with the daily menu of the clinic’s kitchen, and is able to estimate the patients’ energy and macronutrient intake
Summary
Malnutrition in hospitalised patients is a serious condition with significant consequences on all organ systems. Older patients are a high-risk population for developing undernutrition or malnutrition [4]. Several studies have reported that geriatric patients who suffer from malnutrition have an increased risk of longer hospital stays and higher mortality and longer rehabilitation periods [5,6,7,8,9,10]. The serious impacts of malnutrition in older people are wellknown, it is often under-recognised, underdiagnosed and often remains untreated [5]; it is highly important to correctly identify and treat malnourished patients in acute geriatric hospitals [11]
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