An Ensemble Deep Learning Model for Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma Detection Using Histopathological Image Analysis

Abstract

Deep learning approaches for medical image analysis are widely applied for the recognition and classification of different kinds of cancer. In this study, histopathological images of oral cells are analyzed for the programmed recognition of Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) using the proposed framework. The suggested model applies transfer learning and ensemble learning in two phases. In the 1st phase, a few Convolutional neural network (CNN) models are considered through transfer learning applications for OSCC detection. In the 2nd phase, the ensemble model is constructed considering the best two pre-trained CNN from the 1st phase. The proposed classifier is compared with leading-edge models like Alexnet, Resnet50, Resnet101, Inception net, Xception net, and InceptionresnetV2. Results are analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the suggested framework. A three-phase comparative analysis is considered. Firstly, various metrics including accuracy, recall, F-score, and precision are evaluated. Secondly, a graphical analysis using a loss and accuracy graph is performed. Lastly, the accuracy of the proposed classifier is compared with that of other models from existing literature. Following the three-stage performance evaluation, the proposed ensemble classifier exhibits enhanced performance with an accuracy of 97.88%.