Data description
All clinical oral photographs analyzed in this study were retrospectively collected from an oral and maxillofacial surgery center for a period from January 2009 to December 2020. The oral photographic images were captured from various oral cavity areas. The images were of varying resolutions, the largest was 4496 x 3000 pixels and the smallest was 1081 x 836 pixels. The dataset of 980 images was divided into 365 images of OSCC, 315 images of OPMDs and 300 images of non-pathological oral images. The non-pathological oral images were defined as an image of oral mucosa which showed no pathological lesions, e.g., pigmented lesions, OPMDs and malignant lesions.
The reference data used in this study were clinical oral photographs of OSCC, OPMDs and non-pathological oral images which were located in various areas of the oral cavity including buccal mucosa, tongue, upper /lower alveolar ridge, floor of mouth, retromolar trigone and lip. All of the OSCC and OPMDs images were biopsy proven as the gold standard for diagnosis. The OSCC images, which are OSCC stage I-IV according to the TNM clinical staging system as proposed by the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) [15], and OPMDs images used for analysis in this study were oral leukoplakia, erythroplakia, and erythroleukoplakia with the pathological results of mild, moderate and severe epithelial dysplasia and hyperkeratosis. The image of white striae and erythematous lesion surrounded with white striae had the pathological result of oral lichen planus.
Experiment
All photographic images were uploaded to the VisionMarker server and web application for image annotation (Digital Storemesh, Bangkok, Thailand). The public version is available on GitHub (GitHub, Inc., CA, USA). The lesion boundaries of the OSCC and OPMDs images were annotated by three oral and maxillofacial surgeons. Owing to the differences in manual labeling from one surgeon to another, the ground truth used was the largest area of intersection between all of the surgeons’ annotations in the CNN training, validation and testing (Fig. 1).
Image classification
Image classification refers to computer algorithms that can classify an image into a certain class according to its visual content. In this work, the CNN-based image classification networks, DenseNet-169, ResNet-101, SqueezeNet and Swin-S, were adopted to create the multiclass image classification model of “OSCC” and “OPMDs” apart from non-pathological oral images on oral photographic images. The image classification experiment was tested on Google Colab (Google Inc., CA, USA) using a Tesla P100, Nvidia driver: 460.32 and CUDA: 11.2 (Nvidia Corporation, CA, USA). The images were preprocessed by augmentation using Keras ImageDataGenerator (open-source software) then the framework resized input images to 224 x 224 pixels to feed into a neural network. The neural network architectures in this experiment are DenseNet-169, ResNet-101, SqueezeNet and Swin-S. DenseNet-169 and ResNet-101 are pre-trained weight from ImageNet except SqueezeNet and Swin-S which are pre-trained from scratch. The DenseNet-169, ResNet-101, SqueezeNet and Swin-S were modified to have 2-dimension output vectors, for multiclass: OSCC, OPMDs and non-pathological oral image, with softmax activation function. The hyper parameters used in this study were as follows: maximum number of epochs was 43, batch size of 32 and learning rate was 0.00001, except for Swin-S which had maximum number of epochs of 100 and batch size of 16. The validation loss was very close to the training loss, and there was no significant indication of over-fitting. The details of each image classification algorithm were as follows:
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Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNet) was proposed by Huang et al. [16] as a CNN-based classification algorithm which connects all layers (with matching feature-map sizes) directly with each other. DenseNet exploits the potential of the network through feature reuse, yielding condensed models that are easy to train and highly parameter efficient which is a good feature extractor for various computer vision tasks that build on convolutional features.
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Residual Networks (ResNet) was developed by He et al. [17] as an architecture that is implemented by reformulating the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs. This residual learning framework can gain more accuracy of object classification from considerably increased depth, producing results substantially better than previous networks.
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SqueezeNet was proposed by Iandola et al. [18] as a small CNN architecture with model compression techniques to less than 0.5 MB by decreasing the quantity of parameters and maximizing accuracy on a limited budget of parameters. SqueezeNet had 50x fewer parameters than a previous CNN, AlexNet, but maintained AlexNet-level accuracy.
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Swin Transformer (Swin) was presented by Liu et al. [19] as a new vision transformer which produces a hierarchical feature representation and has linear computational complexity with respect to input image size. The design of Swin as a shifted window based self-attention is shown to be effective and efficient on image classification.
Object detection
Detecting of lesions is another key to success in disease diagnosis. The CNN-based object detection is shown to be effective in identifying disease in the image. In this study, Faster R-CNN, YOLOv5, RetinaNet and CenterNet2 were adopted to detect the OSCC and OPMDs lesions in oral photographic images. The object detection experiment used the annotated image from VisionMarker (Digital Storemesh, Bangkok, Thailand). The annotated images were identified by bounding boxes showing locations of the lesion areas; then the pairs of image and annotation were ready for the training process. The image was preprocessed by augmentation using Keras ImageDataGenerator (open-source software) then the framework resized an input image to 256 x 256 pixels, except YOLOv5 which resized an input image to 640 x 640 pixels, to feed into a neural network. The training was performed on an on-premise server with 2 of GPU, TitanXP 12GB, Nvidia driver: 450.102 and CUDA: 11.0 (Nvidia Corporation, CA, USA). The neural network architectures were Faster-R-CNN, YOLOv5, RetinaNet and CenterNet2 with the pre-trained weight from COCO Detection. All the networks were trained using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). The hyper parameters used in this study were as follows: 20,000 iterations, maximum number of epochs was 1,882, learning rate of 0.0025 and batch size per image of 128, except for YOLOv5 which had maximum number of epochs of 200, learning rate of 0.01 and batch size per image of 8. The training loss was reduced and maintained between 15,000 and 20,000 iterations. The details of each object detection algorithm were as follows:
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Faster regional convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN) was introduced by Ren et al. [20] as a CNN-based object detection framework. This algorithm is the combination of the previous object detection system, Fast R-CNN, and Region Proposal Networks (RPNs) into a single network to share their convolutional features leading to a more real-time object detection method. This design significantly improved the speed and accuracy in the object detection compared to basis R-CNN.
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You only look once (YOLO) was proposed by Redmon et al. [21] as a CNN-based object detection algorithm which reframes as a single regression problem, straight from image pixels to bounding box coordinates and class probabilities. The YOLO design enables end-to-end training and realtime speeds while maintaining high average precision.
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RetinaNet was proposed by Lin et al. [22] as a simple one-stage object detector with a new loss function that acts as a more effective alternative to previous algorithms for dealing with class imbalance. This design achieves state of-the-art accuracy and speed for the object detection.
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CenterNet2 was developed by Zhou et al. [23] as a probabilistic interpretation of two-stage detectors. This algorithm was designed as a simple modification of standard two-stage detector training by optimizing a lower bound to a joint probabilistic objective over both stages which achieved desirable speed and accuracy for the object detection.
To evaluate the performance of the image classification and object detection networks, five-fold cross-validation was employed. Data elements were split into 5 subsets using random sampling with equal numbers of OSCC, OPMDs and non-pathological oral images. Then, one subset was considered as a testing set, while the remaining four subsets were used as training and validation sets. This process was repeated 5 times to involve all subsets as testing sets.
Evaluation measures
The metrics used to evaluate the machine learning algorithms in bioinformatics were used in this study [24]. The CNN-based image classification models were evaluated using the precision, recall (sensitivity), specificity, F1 score, and area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC of ROC) to measure the performance in classifying OSCC and OPMDs on the oral photographic images. The classification performance of models was also evaluated by generating a heat map visualization using the gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) [25] to see how the models classify and identify OSCC and OPMDs on photographic images. For the object detection, the performance of the CNN-based object detection models was evaluated to detect a bounding box relative to the ground truth region in the OSCC and OPMDs images by the precision, recall, F1 score and AUC of precision-recall curve. If the IoU value between the generated bounding box and the ground truth was less than 0.5, then the produced bounding box was considered to be a false prediction or false positive.
A test dataset with known pathological results was evaluated to compare the performance of the CNN-based classification models with that of 20 clinicians; 10 board certified oral and maxillofacial surgeons and 10 GPs who have at least 2 years of experience in dental practice in rural hospitals. None of these readers participated in the clinical care or assessment of the enrolled patients, nor did they have access to their medical records. The overall sensitivity and specificity of these clinicians were calculated. Data analyses were conducted using SPSS version 22.0 (SPSS, Chicago, IL). The statistical analysis for image classification and object detection was calculated as follows:
IoU = area of overlap/area of union
Precision = TP/TP + FP
Recall (Sensitivity) = TP/TP + FN
Specificity = TN/TN + FP
F1 score = 2 x (Precision x Recall)/Precision + Recall
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True positive (TP): positive outcomes that the model predicted correctly which IoU > 0.5.
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False positive (FP): positive outcomes that the model predicted incorrectly which IoU < 0.5.
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True negative (TN): negative outcomes that the model predicted correctly.
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False negative (FN): negative outcomes that the model predicted incorrectly.