Sustainable AI for diabetic foot ulcer detection: a deep learning approach for early diagnosis

Diabetic foot ulcer (DFU) is one of the most expensive and debilitating complications of diabetes. According to procedures developed by the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence, early and effective treatment of DFU can minimize the severity of complications, such as unnecessary amputations, and improve overall quality of life. In this paper, a stacked parallel convolution layers based Convolution Neural Network (CNN) is proposed, known as DFU MobileNet, to classify skin infected with DFU against normal skin. The main objective of this work is to develop a DFU recognition system that accurately identifies infected skin. DFU MobileNet consists of three blocks of parallel convolution layers, each with a unique kernel size to extract local and global features distinctly. Using the DFUC 2020 dataset, the proposed DFU MobileNet outperformed existing state-of-the-art models, achieving an accuracy of 92.2% using CNN DenseNet, 95.4% using MobileNet, and 97.8% when combining DenseNet and MobileNet.