Point-of-care, smartphone-based, dual-modality, dual-view, oral cancer screening device with neural network classification for low-resource communities

PLoS One. 2018 Dec 5;13(12):e0207493. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0207493. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Oral cancer is a growing health issue in a number of low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), particularly in South and Southeast Asia. The described dual-modality, dual-view, point-of-care oral cancer screening device, developed for high-risk populations in remote regions with limited infrastructure, implements autofluorescence imaging (AFI) and white light imaging (WLI) on a smartphone platform, enabling early detection of pre-cancerous and cancerous lesions in the oral cavity with the potential to reduce morbidity, mortality, and overall healthcare costs. Using a custom Android application, this device synchronizes external light-emitting diode (LED) illumination and image capture for AFI and WLI. Data is uploaded to a cloud server for diagnosis by a remote specialist through a web app, with the ability to transmit triage instructions back to the device and patient. Finally, with the on-site specialist's diagnosis as the gold-standard, the remote specialist and a convolutional neural network (CNN) were able to classify 170 image pairs into 'suspicious' and 'not suspicious' with sensitivities, specificities, positive predictive values, and negative predictive values ranging from 81.25% to 94.94%.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Cloud Computing
  • Early Detection of Cancer / instrumentation*
  • Early Detection of Cancer / methods*
  • Humans
  • Mobile Applications
  • Mouth Neoplasms / diagnosis*
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Optical Imaging
  • Point-of-Care Systems
  • Poverty
  • Sensitivity and Specificity
  • Smartphone / instrumentation