Automatic Detection of Oral Lesion Measurement Ruler Toward Computer-Aided Image-Based Oral Cancer Screening

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2022 Jul:2022:3218-3221. doi: 10.1109/EMBC48229.2022.9871610.

Abstract

Intelligent computer-aided algorithms analyzing photographs of various mouth regions can help in reducing the high subjectivity in human assessment of oral lesions. Very often, in the images, a ruler is placed near a suspected lesion to indicate its location and as a physical size reference. In this paper, we compared two deep-learning networks: ResNeSt and ViT, to automatically identify ruler images. Even though the ImageN et 1K dataset contains a "ruler" class label, the pre-trained models showed low sensitivity. After fine-tuning with our data, the two networks achieved high performance on our test set as well as a hold-out test set from a different provider. Heatmaps generated using three saliency methods: GradCam and XRAI for ResNeSt model, and Attention Rollout for ViT model, demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique. Clinical Relevance- This is a pre-processing step in automated visual evaluation for oral cancer screening.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Intramural

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Computers
  • Early Detection of Cancer*
  • Humans
  • Mouth Neoplasms* / diagnosis