Amsterdam/Miami – the Netherlands/United States – WSK Medical – a pioneer in the development of AI solutions for head and neck oncology – is proud to announce their joint abstract with Alessandro Villa and Gennaro Musella titled ‘Deep learning algorithm for accurate diagnosis of oral cancer and precancers’ is accepted at the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
Oral cancer (OC) caused approximately 178,000 deaths in 2020 globally, often due to late stage diagnosis and poor survival rates. A proportion of OCs arise from precancers like leukoplakias. Early detection and accurate diagnosis are crucial, especially in low and middle income countries with limited access to specialized care.
Output of the AI algorithm of a correct OC case with the confidence score per superclass.
“Really pleased with the acceptance of our abstract that is showing promising initial results to further work on with Alessandro and Gennaro” says Jonathan Woodburn, CTO at WSK Medical.
The consortium collected intraoral images from patients seen at two large cancer centers (Sri Lanka and USA). Images were resized to 320 and clustered in four super classes: OC, Precancer, Benign and Normal. During training, random augmentations were applied to the images, including rotation, flipping, and exclusion of pixels.
The YOLO (You Only Look Once) v11 architecture was selected, as it provided the highest performance in several state-of-the-art problems. The Classifier variant of the architecture was chosen in order to provide classification output.
Initial results showed that the deep learning-based classification is being able to classify suspicious oral cavity lesions and may therefore serve as a valuable tool to assist clinicians in early detection of OC/Precancer, potentially improving patient outcomes through timely intervention. To improve the performance of the model, a larger dataset with a better class balance is required and the consortium will invest the coming period to collect and annotated this dataset.
The abstract can be found here.
About WSK Medical
WSK Medical is a global leading Artificial Intelligence software solution provider that focuses on the development and deployment of AI software solutions for the early detection and classification of cancer. Our aim is to bring you the most advanced AI technologies to assist clinicians and doctors. We do this by working in partnership, to develop high performing and secure AI software as a medical device for oncology purposes. For more information about our AI solutions, please contact us.
