Automated classification of cells into multiple classes in epithelial tissue of oral squamous cell carcinoma using transfer learning and convolutional neural network

The analysis of tissue of a tumor in the oral cavity is essential for the pathologist to ascertain its grading. Recent studies using biopsy images reveal computer-aided diagnosis for oral sub-mucous fibrosis (OSF) carried out using machine learning algorithms, but no research has yet been outlined for multi-class grading of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). Pertinently, with the advent of deep learning in digital imaging and computational aid in the diagnosis, multi-class classification of OSCC biopsy images can help in timely and effective prognosis and multi-modal treatment protocols for oral cancer patients, thus reducing the operational workload of pathologists while enhancing management of the disease. With this motivation, this study attempts to classify OSCC into its four classes as per the Broder's system of histological grading. The study is conducted on oral biopsy images applying two methods: (i) through the application of transfer learning using pre-trained deep convolutional neural network (CNN) wherein four candidate pre-trained models, namely Alexnet, VGG-16, VGG-19 and Resnet-50, were chosen to find the most suitable model for our classification problem, and (ii) by a proposed CNN model. Although the highest classification accuracy of 92.15% is achieved by Resnet-50 model, the experimental findings highlight that the proposed CNN model outperformed the transfer learning approaches displaying accuracy of 97.5%. It can be concluded that the proposed CNN based multi-class grading method of OSCC could be used for diagnosis of patients with OSCC.