Study of morphological and textural features for classification of oral squamous cell carcinoma by traditional machine learning techniques.

BACKGROUND: Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is the most prevalent form of oral cancer. Very few researches have been carried out for the automatic diagnosis of OSCC using artificial intelligence techniques. Though biopsy is the ultimate test for cancer diagnosis, analyzing a biopsy report is a very much challenging task. To develop computer-assisted software that will diagnose cancerous cells automatically is very important and also a major need of the hour. AIM: To identify OSCC based on morphological and textural features of hand-cropped cell nuclei by traditional machine learning methods. METHODS: In this study, a structure for semi-automated detection and classification of oral cancer from microscopic biopsy images of OSCC, using clinically significant and biologically interpretable morphological and textural features, are examined and proposed. Forty biopsy slides were used for the study from which a total of 452 hand-cropped cell nuclei has been considered for morphological and textural feature extraction and further analysis. After making a comparative analysis of commonly used methods in the segmentation technique, a combined technique is proposed. Our proposed methodology achieves the best segmentation of the nuclei. Henceforth the features extracted were fed into five classifiers, support vector machine, logistic regression, linear discriminant, k-nearest neighbors and decision tree classifier. Classifiers were also analyzed by training time. Another contribution of the study is a large indigenous cell level dataset of OSCC biopsy images. RESULTS: We achieved 99.78% accuracy applying decision tree classifier in classifying OSCC using morphological and textural features. CONCLUSION: It is found that both morphological and textural features play a very important role in OSCC diagnosis. It is hoped that this type of framework will help the clinicians/pathologists in OSCC diagnosis.

Automated oral squamous cell carcinoma identification using shape, texture and color features of whole image strips.

Despite profound knowledge of the incidence of oral cancers and a large body of research beyond it, it continues to beat diagnosis and treatment management. Post physical observation by clinicians, a biopsy is a gold standard for accurate detection of any abnormalities. Towards the application of artificial intelligence as an aid to diagnosis, automated cell nuclei segmentation is the most essential step for the recognition of the cancer cells. In this study, we have extracted the shape, texture and color features from the histopathological images collected indigenously from regional hospitals. A dataset of 42 whole slide slices was used to automatically segment and generate a cell level dataset of 720 nuclei. Next, different classifiers were applied for classification purposes. 99.4 % accuracy using Decision Tree Classifier, 100 % accuracy using both SVM and Logistic regression and 100 % accuracy using SVM, Logistic regression and Linear Discriminant were acquired for shape, textural and color features respectively. The in-depth analysis showed SVM and Linear Discriminant classifier gave the best result for texture and color features respectively. The achieved result can be effectively converted to software as an assistant diagnostic tool.

Histopathological imaging database for oral cancer analysis.

The repository is composed of 1224 images divided into two sets of images with two different resolutions. First set consists of 89 histopathological images with the normal epithelium of the oral cavity and 439 images of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma (OSCC) in 100x magnification. The second set consists of 201 images with the normal epithelium of the oral cavity and 495 histopathological images of OSCC in 400x magnification. The images were captured using a Leica ICC50 HD microscope from Hematoxyline and Eosin (H&E) stained tissue slides collected, prepared and catalogued by medical experts from 230 patients. A subset of 269 images from the second data set was used to detect OSCC based on textural features [1]. Histopathology plays a very important role in diagnosing a disease. It is the investigation of biological tissues to detect the presence of diseased cells in microscopic detail. It usually involves a biopsy. Till date biopsy is the gold-standard test to diagnose cancer. The biopsy slides are examined based on various cytological criteria under a microscope. Therefore, there is a high possibility of not retaining uniformity and ensuring reproducibility in outcomes [2, 3]. Computational diagnostic tools, on the other hand, facilitate objective judgments by making the use of the quantitative measure. This dataset can be utilized in establishing automated diagnostic tool using Artificial Intelligence approaches.