Multi-scale Vision Transformer toward improved non-invasive anaemia detection using palm video

Anaemia, a condition characterised by reduced haemoglobin levels, exerts a significant global impact, affecting billions of individuals worldwide. According to data from the World Health Organisation (WHO), India exhibits notably high anaemia prevalence in comparison to other developing nations. The urgency arises for the development of non-invasive, cost-effective, and accurate anaemia screening technologies, primarily due to the substantial costs and logistical complexities associated with invasive screening methods, which impede their broad adoption on a global scale. The current endeavor aims to establish a robust anaemia detection system through the integration of cutting-edge computational methodologies with the traditional yet less precise approach of assessing haemoglobin levels based on observation of palm pallor. The proposed method employs time-domain analysis to establish a correlation between blood haemoglobin concentration and the observed changes in palm colour resulting from the application and release of pressure. This involves employing a custom device to capture and record the complete sequence of palm colour changes using a smartphone camera sensor, followed by data processing and analysis. The Multi-scale Vision Transformer is then employed to extract features from dominant frames. The approach further incorporates the application of a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network as a regression model based on the reduced feature outcomes. The proposed system accurately estimates blood haemoglobin levels with RMSE, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 0.509, 96.88%, 86.39%, and 92.59%, respectively based on 531 video samples of palm evidence.