Deep neural network uncertainty estimation for early oral cancer diagnosis

Background

Early diagnosis in oral cancer is essential to reduce both morbidity and mortality. This study explores the use of uncertainty estimation in deep learning for early oral cancer diagnosis.

Methods

We develop a Bayesian deep learning model termed ‘Probabilistic HRNet’, which utilizes the ensemble MC dropout method on HRNet. Additionally, two oral lesion datasets with distinct distributions are created. We conduct a retrospective study to assess the predictive performance and uncertainty of Probabilistic HRNet across these datasets.

Results

Probabilistic HRNet performs optimally on the In-domain test set, achieving an F1 score of 95.3% and an AUC of 96.9% by excluding the top 30% high-uncertainty samples. For evaluations on the Domain-shift test set, the results show an F1 score of 64.9% and an AUC of 80.3%. After excluding 30% of the high-uncertainty samples, these metrics improve to an F1 score of 74.4% and an AUC of 85.6%.

Conclusion

Redirecting samples with high uncertainty to experts for subsequent diagnosis significantly decreases the rates of misdiagnosis, which highlights that uncertainty estimation is vital to ensure safe decision making for computer-aided early oral cancer diagnosis.