Application of Artificial Intelligence to the Monitoring of Medication Adherence for Tuberculosis Treatment in Africa: Algorithm Development and Validation.

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) applications based on advanced deep learning methods in image recognition tasks can increase efficiency in the monitoring of medication adherence through automation. AI has sparsely been evaluated for the monitoring of medication adherence in clinical settings. However, AI has the potential to transform the way health care is delivered even in limited-resource settings such as Africa. Objective: We aimed to pilot the development of a deep learning model for simple binary classification and confirmation of proper medication adherence to enhance efficiency in the use of video monitoring of patients in tuberculosis treatment. Methods: We used a secondary data set of 861 video images of medication intake that were collected from consenting adult patients with tuberculosis in an institutional review board-approved study evaluating video-observed therapy in Uganda. The video images were processed through a series of steps to prepare them for use in a training model. First, we annotated videos using a specific protocol to eliminate those with poor quality. After the initial annotation step, 497 videos had sufficient quality for training the models. Among them, 405 were positive samples, whereas 92 were negative samples. With some preprocessing techniques, we obtained 160 frames with a size of 224 × 224 in each video. We used a deep learning framework that leveraged 4 convolutional neural networks models to extract visual features from the video frames and automatically perform binary classification of adherence or nonadherence. We evaluated the diagnostic properties of the different models using sensitivity, specificity, Results: Diagnostic properties and discriminative performance from internal cross-validation were moderate to high in the binary classification tasks with 4 selected automated deep learning models. The sensitivity ranged from 92.8 to 95.8%, specificity from 43.5 to 55.4%, Conclusions: All 4 deep learning models showed comparable diagnostic properties and discriminative performance. The findings serve as a reasonable proof of concept to support the potential application of AI in the binary classification of video frames to predict medication adherence.