Finding the Differences in Capillaries of Taste Buds between Smokers and Non-Smokers Using the Convolutional Neural Networks

Taste function and condition may be a tool that exhibits a rapid deficit to impress the subject with an objectively measured effect of smoking on his/her own body, because smokers exhibit significantly lower taste sensitivity than non-smokers. This study proposed a visual method to measure capillaries of taste buds with capillaroscopy and classified the difference between smokers and non-smokers through convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The dataset was collected from 26 human subjects through the capillaroscopy with the low and high magnification directly; of which 13 were smokers, and the other 13 were non-smokers. The acquired dataset consisted of 2600 images. The results of gradient-weighted class activation mapping (grad-cam) enabled us to understand the difference in capillaries of taste buds between smokers and non-smokers. Through the results, it was found that CNNs gave us a good performance with 79% accuracy. It was discussed that there was a shortage of extracted features when the conventional methods such as structural similarity index (SSIM) and scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) were used to classify.