In Journal of biomedical optics
SignificanceOral cancer is one of the most prevalent cancers, especially in middle- and low-income countries such as India. Automatic segmentation of oral cancer images can improve the diagnostic workflow, which is a significant task in oral cancer image analysis. Despite the remarkable success of deep-learning networks in medical segmentation, they rarely provide uncertainty quantification for their output.AimWe aim to estimate uncertainty in a deep-learning approach to semantic segmentation of oral cancer images and to improve the accuracy and reliability of predictions.ApproachThis work introduced a UNet-based Bayesian deep-learning (BDL) model to segment potentially malignant and malignant lesion areas in the oral cavity. The model can quantify uncertainty in predictions. We also developed an efficient model that increased the inference speed, which is almost six times smaller and two times faster (inference speed) than the original UNet. The dataset in this study was collected using our customized screening platform and was annotated by oral oncology specialists.ResultsThe proposed approach achieved good segmentation performance as well as good uncertainty estimation performance. In the experiments, we observed an improvement in pixel accuracy and mean intersection over union by removing uncertain pixels. This result reflects that the model provided less accurate predictions in uncertain areas that may need more attention and further inspection. The experiments also showed that with some performance compromises, the efficient model reduced computation time and model size, which expands the potential for implementation on portable devices used in resource-limited settings.ConclusionsOur study demonstrates the UNet-based BDL model not only can perform potentially malignant and malignant oral lesion segmentation, but also can provide informative pixel-level uncertainty estimation. With this extra uncertainty information, the accuracy and reliability of the model's prediction can be improved.
Song Bofan, Li Shaobai, Sunny Sumsum, Gurushanth Keerthi, Mendonca Pramila, Mukhia Nirza, Patrick Sanjana, Peterson Tyler, Gurudath Shubha, Raghavan Subhashini, Tsusennaro Imchen, Leivon Shirley, Kolur Trupti, Shetty Vivek, Bushan Vidya, Ramesh Rohan, Pillai Vijay, Wilder-Smith Petra, Suresh Amritha, Kuriakose Moni Abraham, Birur Praveen, Liang Rongguang
2022-Nov
Bayesian deep learning, Monte Carlo dropout, oral cancer, semantic segmentation, uncertainty measures of deep learning
