Automated tumor assessment of squamous cell carcinoma on tongue cancer patients with hyperspectral imaging

Head and neck cancer (HNC) includes cancers in the oral/nasal cavity, pharynx, larynx, etc., and it is the sixth most common cancer worldwide. The principal treatment is surgical removal where a complete tumor resection is crucial to reduce the recurrence and mortality rate. Intraoperative tumor imaging enables surgeons to objectively visualize the malignant lesion to maximize the tumor removal with healthy safe margins. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is an emerging imaging modality for cancer detection, which can augment surgical tumor inspection, currently limited to subjective visual inspection. In this paper, we aim to investigate HSI for automated cancer detection during image-guided surgery, because it can provide quantitative information about light interaction with biological tissues and exploit the potential for malignant tissue discrimination. The proposed solution forms a novel framework for automated tongue-cancer detection, explicitly exploiting HSI, which particularly uses the spectral variations in specific bands describing the cancerous tissue properties. The method follows a machine-learning based classification, employing linear support vector machine (SVM), and offers a superior sensitivity and a significant decrease in computation time. The model evaluation is on 7 ex-vivo specimens of squamous cell carcinoma of the tongue, with known histology. The HSI combined with the proposed classification reaches a sensitivity of 94%, specificity of 68% and area under the curve (AUC) of 92%. This feasibility study paves the way for introducing HSI as a non-invasive imaging aid for cancer detection and increase of the effectiveness of surgical oncology.