Automated classification of four types of developmental odontogenic cysts

Odontogenic cysts originate from remnants of the tooth forming epithelium in the jaws and gingiva. There are various kinds of such cysts with different biological behaviours that carry different patient risks and require different treatment plans. Types of odontogenic cysts can be distinguished by the properties of their epithelial layers in H&E stained samples. Herein we detail a set of image features for automatically distinguishing between four types of odontogenic cyst in digital micrographs and evaluate their effectiveness using two statistical classifiers - a support vector machine (SVM) and bagging with logistic regression as the base learner (BLR). Cyst type was correctly predicted from among four classes of odontogenic cysts between 83.8% and 92.3% of the time with an SVM and between 90 ± 0.92% and 95.4 ± 1.94% with a BLR. One particular cyst type was associated with the majority of misclassifications. Omission of this cyst type from the data set improved the classification rate for the remaining three cyst types to 96.2% for both SVM and BLR.