Exploring the efficacy of various CNN architectures in diagnosing oral cancer from squamous cell carcinoma

Oral cancer can result from mutations in cells located in the lips or mouth. Diagnosing oral cavity squamous cell carcinoma (OCSCC) is particularly challenging, often occurring at advanced stages. To address this, computer-aided diagnosis methods are increasingly being used. In this work, a deep learning-based approach utilizing models such as VGG16, ResNet50, LeNet-5, MobileNetV2, and Inception V3 is presented. NEOR and OCSCC datasets were used for feature extraction, with virtual slide images divided into tiles and classified as normal or squamous cell cancer. Performance metrics like accuracy, F1-score, AUC, precision, and recall were analyzed to determine the prerequisites for optimal CNN performance. The proposed CNN approaches were effective for classifying OCSCC and oral dysplasia, with the highest accuracy of 95.41 % achieved using MobileNetV2.

Key findings

Deep learning models, particularly MobileNetV2, achieved high classification accuracy (95.41 %) for OCSCC.

CNN-based methods show promise for early-stage OCSCC and oral dysplasia diagnosis. Performance parameters like precision, recall, and F1-score help optimize CNN model selection for this task.