Multiclass classification of oral mucosal lesions by deep learning from clinical images without performing any restrictions

Oral cancer is a frequently malignant tumor that can be detected during an oral examination. Unfortunately, it is often diagnosed in advanced stages, which leads to low survival rates of about 50% at five years. Due to the low survival rate, it is crucial to develop automated systems that allow the...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Redondo, Alejandro, Ivaylova, Katerina, Bachiller Mayoral, Margarita, Rincón Zamorano, Mariano, Cuadra Troncoso, José Manuel, Tamimi, Faleh, López Cedrún, José Luis, Diniz Freitas, Márcio, Lago Méndez, Lucía, Rubín Roger, Guillermo, Torres, Jesús, Bagán, Leticia, Hernández, Gonzalo, López-Pintor, Rosa María
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Institución:Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
Repositorio:e-spacio. Repositorio Institucional de la UNED
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:e-spacio.uned.es:20.500.14468/31698
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14468/31698
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:1203.17 Informática
images classification
oral cancer
oral potentially malignant disorders
deep learning
convolutional neural network
skip connection networks
visual transformers
convNeXt
ODS 3 - Salud y bienestar
ODS 9 - Industria, innovación e infraestructura
Descripción
Sumario:Oral cancer is a frequently malignant tumor that can be detected during an oral examination. Unfortunately, it is often diagnosed in advanced stages, which leads to low survival rates of about 50% at five years. Due to the low survival rate, it is crucial to develop automated systems that allow the classification of oral lesions according to their severity, aiding in the early diagnosis of oral cancer. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of using clinical images and deep learning based models to perform a multiclass classification of oral mucosal lesions in color photographs taken without following any acquisition protocol. The classification differentiated four classes: malignant, potentially malignant, benign and healthy. The dataset included a total of 3246 images from 1013 patients, with 40 different categories of oral lesions, including healthy oral mucosa. The images showed different areas of the oral cavity and were captured from different perspectives by diverse dentists and maxillofacial surgeons in the practice. For the classification, different deep learning architectures were applied and compared, from the best known convolutional neural networks (CNN) and skip connection networks (SCN), to more innovative architectures such as visual transformers and a recent hybrid architecture, ConvNeXt v2. The ConvNeXt v2 Tiny architecture, with 85.53% accuracy, 85.02% precision, 85.50% recall, 84.92% F1-score, and 97.40% ROC AUC for an input image size of 354 × 354 pixels, outperformed the other architectures on the same database. The present model improved on previous proposals by considering a greater number of oral lesions and output classes.