Development and validation of an explainable machine learning model for predicting occult lymph node metastasis in early-stage oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma: A multi-center study

This study innovatively utilized nine easily obtained clinicopathological features to construct an explainable RF model, providing a practical and reliable tool for predicting OLNM in early-stage OTSCC. More importantly, it also provided interpretable results, thus overcoming the "impenetrable black box" of conventional ML models.