A Pathology-Based Machine Learning Method to Assist in Epithelial Dysplasia Diagnosis
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The Epithelial Dysplasia (ED) is a tissue alteration commonly present in lesions preceding oral cancer, being its presence one of the most important factors in the progression toward carcinoma. This study proposes a method to design a low computational cost classification system to support the detection of dysplastic epithelia, contributing to reduce the variability of pathologist assessments. We employ a multilayer artificial neural network (MLP-ANN) and defining the regions of the epithelium to be assessed based on the knowledge of the pathologist. The performance of the proposed solution was statistically evaluated. The implemented MLP-ANN presented an average accuracy of 87 variability much inferior to that obtained from three trained evaluators. Moreover, the proposed solution led to results which are very close to those obtained using a convolutional neural network (CNN) implemented by transfer learning, with 100 times less computational complexity. In conclusion, our results show that a simple neural network structure can lead to a performance equivalent to that of much more complex structures, which are routinely used in the literature.
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