Investigating the use of a two-stage attention-aware convolutional neural network for the automated diagnosis of otitis media from tympanic membrane images: a prediction model development and validation study

CNNs provide a useful and effective tool for the automated classification of TM images. In addition, having a weakly supervised method such as CAM can help the network focus on discriminative parts of the image and improve performance with a relatively small database. This two-stage method is beneficial to improve the accuracy of diagnosis of otitis media for junior otolaryngologists and physicians in other disciplines.