Diagnosis of oral cancer using deep learning algorithms

Objective. The aim of this study was to use deep learning for the automatic diagnosis of oral cancer, employing images of the lips, mucosa, and oral cavity. A deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model, augmented with data, was proposed to enhance oral cancer diagnosis. Materials and methods. We developed a Mobile Net deep CNN designed to detect and classify oral cancer in the lip, mucosa, and oral cavity areas. The dataset comprised 131 images, including 87 positive and 44 negative cases. Additionally, we expanded the dataset by varying cropping, focus, rotation, brightness, and flipping. The diagnostic performance of the proposed CNN was evaluated by calculating accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and area under the curve (AUC) for oral cancer. Results. The CNN achieved an overall diagnostic accuracy of 90.9% and an AUC of 0.91 with the dataset for oral cancer. Conclusion. Despite the limited number of images of lips, mucosa, and oral cavity, the CNN method developed for the automatic diagnosis of oral cancer demonstrated high accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and AUC when augmented with data.