Noninvasive diagnosis of oral squamous cell carcinoma by multi‐level deep residual learning on optical coherence tomography images

Abstract Background Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma (OSCC) is one of the most severe cancers in the world, and its early detection is crucial for saving patients. There is an inevitable necessity to develop the automatic noninvasive OSCC diagnosis approach to identify the malignant tissues on Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images. Methods This study presents a novel Multi‐Level Deep Residual Learning (MDRL) network to identify malignant and benign(normal) tissues from OCT images and trains the network in 460 OCT images captured from 37 patients. The diagnostic performances are compared with different methods in the image‐level and the resected patch‐level. Results The MDRL system achieves the excellent diagnostic performance, with 91.2% sensitivity, 83.6% specificity, 87.5% accuracy, 85.3% PPV, and 90.2% NPV in image‐level, with 0.92 AUC value. Besides, it also implements 100% sensitivity, 86.7% specificity, 93.1% accuracy, 87.5% PPV, and 100% NPV in the resected patch‐level. Conclusion The developed deep learning system expresses superior performance in noninvasive oral squamous cell carcinoma diagnosis, compared with traditional CNNs and a specialist.