Research on the Classification of Benign and Malignant Parotid Tumors Based on Transfer Learning and a Convolutional Neural Network

The classification of benign and malignant parotid tumors is very crucial for the selection of surgical methods and their prognoses. The wide application of deep learning technology in the field of medical imaging also provides new ideas for the computer-aided diagnosis of parotid gland tumors. In addition, because the pathological types of parotid gland tumors are very complicated and the computed tomography (CT) images of benign and malignant patients are also very similar, some clinicians may misjudge tumors due to a lack of experience, which affects the effect of surgical treatment and prognosis. Therefore, this research proposes using deep learning methods to solve this problem. This study uses the four classic pretraining models of VGG16, InceptionV3, ResNet and DenseNet to classify parotid CT images using transfer learning methods and uses an improved convolutional neural network (CNN) model to classify parotid CT images. The experimental results show that the improved CNN model achieves an accuracy of 97.78%, and its classification performance is better than those of the other four transfer learning methods. It can effectively diagnose benign and malignant parotid tumors and improve the diagnostic accuracy.