Ear conditions such as acute otitis media, chronic otitis media, earwax plugs, and
myringosclerosis require accurate early screening and treatment to prevent the risk
of permanent hearing loss. Previous research has applied the YOLOv8 algorithm
on a Raspberry Pi device to detect these conditions, but it still faces the challenge
of slow inference speed, reaching 1 second per frame.
This study aims to develop an ear disease detection system using the state-of-the
art YOLOv8s deep learning algorithm implemented on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano
edge computing device. The dataset consists of approximately 2,200 ear endoscopy
images in YOLO format, divided into training, validation, and test sets. The system
was trained to detect six classes of ear conditions: Acute Otitis Media, Chronic
Otitis Media, Earwax Plug, Myringosclerosis, Normal, and Undefined. The model
was trained using an optimized CNN architecture from Ultralytics on an NVIDIA
RTX 3050 GPU with an input image size of 640x640 pixels.
Preliminary results show that the YOLOv8s variant delivers better performance and
efficiency compared to YOLOv11n. In final testing using the test dataset, the
YOLOv8s model achieved a precision of 99%, a recall of 100%, an mAP50 of 99%,
and an mAP50-95 of 93%. When implemented on NVIDIA Jetson Nano hardware,
the system is capable of processing video inference from a camera endoscopy at an
average frame rate of 15 FPS. The system was also successfully integrated with
Flask AI Server, Laravel Web Server, and a MySQL database to support the
diagnostic process and the storage of examination results. With this approach, the
developed system serves as a responsive, standalone, and efficient decision support
system to assist medical personnel in conducting initial screenings for ear diseases
at primary care facilities.