Learned and handcrafted features for early-stage laryngeal SCC diagnosis

Squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is the most common and malignant laryngeal cancer. An early-stage diagnosis is of crucial importance to lower patient mortality and preserve both the laryngeal anatomy and vocal-fold function. However, this may be challenging as the initial larynx modifications, mainly concerning the mucosa vascular tree and the epithelium texture and color, are small and can pass unnoticed to the human eye. The primary goal of this paper was to investigate a learning-based approach to early-stage SCC diagnosis, and compare the use of (i) texture-based global descriptors, such as local binary patterns, and (ii) deep-learning-based descriptors. These features, extracted from endoscopic narrow-band images of the larynx, were classified with support vector machines as to discriminate healthy, precancerous, and early-stage SCC tissues. When tested on a benchmark dataset, a median classification recall of 98% was obtained with the best feature combination, outperforming the state of the art (recall = 95%). Despite further investigation is needed (e.g., testing on a larger dataset), the achieved results support the use of the developed methodology in the actual clinical practice to provide accurate early-stage SCC diagnosis.