An Optimal Hierarchical Approach for Oral Cancer Diagnosis Using Rough Set Theory and an Amended Version of the Competitive Search Algorithm

Oral cancer is introduced as the uncontrolled cells’ growth that causes destruction and damage to nearby tissues. This occurs when a sore or lump grows in the mouth that does not disappear. Cancers of the cheeks, lips, floor of the mouth, tongue, sinuses, hard and soft palate, and lungs (throat) are types of this cancer that will be deadly if not detected and cured in the beginning stages. The present study proposes a new pipeline procedure for providing an efficient diagnosis system for oral cancer images. In this procedure, after preprocessing and segmenting the area of interest of the inputted images, the useful characteristics are achieved. Then, some number of useful features are selected, and the others are removed to simplify the method complexity. Finally, the selected features move into a support vector machine (SVM) to classify the images by selected characteristics. The feature selection and classification steps are optimized by an amended version of the competitive search optimizer. The technique is finally implemented on the Oral Cancer (Lips and Tongue) images (OCI) dataset, and its achievements are confirmed by the comparison of it with some other latest techniques, which are weight balancing, a support vector machine, a gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), the deep method, transfer learning, mobile microscopy, and quadratic discriminant analysis. The simulation results were authenticated by four indicators and indicated the suggested method’s efficiency in relation to the others in diagnosing the oral cancer cases.