Leveraging Deep Learning for Fever Temperature Analysis and Pattern Recognition

Tympanic temperature is one of the most fundamental indicators for the diagnosis of diseases. Due to its importance, using patients' temperature data to aid in the diagnostic process would be beneficial. This work uses temperature data collected from various patients to classify diseases. We consider dengue, tuberculosis, and non-infectious and non-tubercular bacterial diseases. Extracting essential features from the temperature data is necessary so that the downstream layers only have to consider important features, not miscellaneous information. This feature extraction is done using two methods - Convolution Neural Networks and Autoencoders. We introduce three models for Explainable Temperature Analysis - ExTemp-Conv-SM, ExTemp-Conv-LG and ExTemp-Auto. We achieve a classification accuracy of 70% over these four disease classes. We also use explainable AI tools, like GradCAM, to identify distinguishing patterns in temperature fluctuations that can characterize diseases. We generate such patterns for all four diseases under consideration. We note that the patterns generated for dengue and tuberculosis match the findings in biological observation studies. We hope that the methods in this paper can be leveraged for other diseases and used to aid the diagnostic process.