Oral mucosal disease recognition based on dynamic self-attention and feature discriminant loss

Oral Dis. 2023 Sep 20. doi: 10.1111/odi.14732. Online ahead of print.

Abstract

Objectives: To develop a dynamic self-attention and feature discrimination loss function (DSDF) model for identifying oral mucosal diseases presented to solve the problems of data imbalance, complex image background, and high similarity and difference of visual characteristics among different types of lesion areas.

Methods: In DSDF, dynamic self-attention network can fully mine the context information between adjacent areas, improve the visual representation of the network, and promote the network model to learn and locate the image area of interest. Then, the feature discrimination loss function is used to constrain the diversity of channel characteristics, so as to enhance the feature discrimination ability of local similar areas.

Results: The experimental results show that the recognition accuracy of the proposed method for oral mucosal disease is the highest at 91.16%, and is about 6% ahead of other advanced methods. In addition, DSDF has recall of 90.87% and F1 of 90.60%.

Conclusions: Convolutional neural networks can effectively capture the visual features of the oral mucosal disease lesions, and the distinguished visual features of different oral lesions can be extracted better using dynamic self-attention and feature discrimination loss function, which is conducive to the auxiliary diagnosis of oral mucosal diseases.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; computer-aided diagnosis; convolutional neural network; deep learning; early detection; oral cancer; tongue cancer.