AI-IoMT Synergy: A Real-Time Framework for Automated Urinary Tract Infections (UTI) Detection Based on Urine Sediments

Abstract

A Urinary Tract Infection (UTI) is characterized by an infection affecting the urinary system, including the kidneys, bladder, urethra, and ureters, with clinical presentations including pyelonephritis, cystitis, and urethritis. While conventional diagnostic methods such as urinalysis and urine culture and sensitivity (C&S) remain widely used, they are limited by subjectivity, time-intensive processing, susceptibility to contamination and risks of false-positive or false-negative results. This study proposes a comprehensive deep learning (DL) and Internet of Things (IoMT) framework to automate the real-time detection and classification of UTIs using microscopic urine sediment images. The study employed 2 datasets (A and B). Dataset A, a clinically acquired dataset, comprises of 3345 images (normal, erythrocytes, fungi and pus) and Dataset B, a publicly accessible data comprises of 5377 images and 26,419 cropped microscopic images corresponding to 7 classes (casts, crystals, erythrocytes leukocytes, epithelial cells, epithelial nuclei, mycetes). A two-stage classification approach was implemented: a binary task to distinguish urine sediments from normal cases, followed by a multiclass task (clinical data and online data) to identify the specific infection type. All images underwent pre-processing, including normalization, resizing, noise removal, and augmentation to enhance feature visibility and model generalizability. The data were partitioned into training (65%), validation (25%), and test (10%) sets. Six state-of-the-art DL architectures, including ResNet50-V2, ResNet101-V2, Inception-V3, XceptionV2, Inception-ResNet-V2, and VGG19 were fine-tuned using transfer learning and evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and confusion matrices. The proposed models were uploaded to a website to enable realtime detection (accessible via this link: https://uticlassification.app/). The proposed pipeline demonstrated strong performance in both classification tasks, underscoring the potential of deep learning as a reliable, rapid, and reproducible tool for automated urine sediment identification in clinical practice.

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