AIM: To construct and evaluate a diagnostic model based on transfer learning and data augmentation as a non-invasive tool for fusarium identification of fungal keratitis.

METHODS: A retrospective study. In this study, 2 157 images of fungal keratitis patients who underwent in vivo confocal microscopy examination in the Department of Ophthalmology of the people's Hospital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region from March 2017 to January 2020 were included as the dataset, which was classified according to the results of microbial culture. The dataset was subsequently randomly divided into training set(1 380 images), validation set(345 images)and test set(432 images). We used the transfer learning Inception-ResNet V2 network to construct a diagnostic model, and to compare the performance of the model trained on different datasets. The performance of the diagnostic model evaluated with specificity, sensitivity, accuracy, and area under the receiver operating characteristics curve(AUC).

RESULTS: The model trained with the original training set had a specificity rate of 71.6%, a sensitivity rate of 72.0%, an accuracy rate of 71.8% and AUC of 0.785(95%CI: 0.742-0.828, P<0.0001). And the model trained with the augmented training set had a specificity rate of 76.6%, a sensitivity rate of 83.1%, an accuracy rate of 79.9% and AUC of 0.876(95%CI: 0.843-0.909, P<0.0001), which made the model's prediction performance boost.

CONCLUSION: In this study, we constructed an intelligent diagnosis system for fungal keratitis fusarium through transfer learning, which has higher accuracy, and realized the intelligent diagnosis of fungal keratitis pathogen fusarium. Furthermore, we verified that the data augmentation strategy can improve the performance of the intelligent diagnosis system when the original dataset is limited, and this method can be used for intelligent diagnosis and identification of fungal keratitis pathogen fusarium.