Medical Imaging Fusing Vision Transformer: Laryngeal Cancer Screening with Explanation

Abstract

Early and timely screening of laryngeal cancer is crucial for improving clinical outcomes. In recent years, NBI endoscopy has become a standard diagnostic tool for the detection of laryngeal lesions. However, its effective use requires well-trained clinicians and the procedure is time-consuming and subject to interobserver variability. In this context, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) offers a promising solution to support clinical decision-making. In this work, we proposed applying transformer and attention mechanism for analyzing the narrow band imaging and distinguish benign and malignant lesions. Results show it has good classification performance with F1 (82.72%), accuracy(82.33%). In addition, the result of laryngeal cancer screening is explainable for clinicians. The explainability is utilizing the state of art segmentation method (MedSAM) to provide the useful pathological information area for clinicians. The proposed methodology fusing classification and segmentation provides a translating on laryngeal cancer screening.