Classification of oral salivary gland tumors based on texture features in optical coherence tomography images

Currently, the diagnoses of oral diseases primarily depend on the visual recognition of experienced clinicians. It has been proven that automatic recognition based on images can support clinical decision-making by extracting and analyzing objective hidden information. In recent years, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has become a powerful optical imaging technique with the advantages of high resolution and non-invasion. In our study, a dataset composed of four kinds of oral salivary gland tumors (SGTs) was obtained from a homemade swept-source OCT, including two benign and two malignant tumors. Seventy-six texture features were extracted from OCT images to create computational models of diseases. It was demonstrated that the artificial neural network (ANN) based on principal component analysis (PCA) can obtain high diagnostic sensitivity and specificity (higher than 99%) for these four kinds of tumors. The classification accuracy of each tumor is larger than 99%. In addition, the performances of two classifiers (ANN and support vector machine) were quantitatively evaluated based on SGTs. It was proven that the texture features in OCT images provided objective information to classify oral tumors.