Detection of oral squamous cell carcinoma in clinical photographs using a vision transformer

Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is amongst the most common malignancies, with an estimated incidence of 377,000 and 177,000 deaths worldwide. The interval between the onset of symptoms and the start of adequate treatment is directly related to tumor stage and 5-year-survival rates of patients. Early detection is therefore crucial for efficient cancer therapy. This study aims to detect OSCC on clinical photographs (CP) automatically. 1406 CP(s) were manually annotated and labeled as a reference. A deep-learning approach based on Swin-Transformer was trained and validated on 1265 CP(s). Subsequently, the trained algorithm was applied to a test set consisting of 141 CP(s). The classification accuracy and the area-under-the-curve (AUC) were calculated. The proposed method achieved a classification accuracy of 0.986 and an AUC of 0.99 for classifying OSCC on clinical photographs. Deep learning-based assistance of clinicians may raise the rate of early detection of oral cancer and hence the survival rate and quality of life of patients.