Differentiation of benign and malignant oral lesions through surface texture analysis and SVM modeling

To evaluate the diagnostic potential of surface texture features extracted from clinical images in objectively differentiating benign from malignant oral lesions, and to validate classification performance of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model using these features.

This study included 275 intraoral photographs of oral mucosal lesions with biopsy-confirmed diagnoses, sourced from both institutional archives and a public dataset. Lesion areas were manually annotated and converted into 3D surface plots to extract grayscale-based texture features. Eight statistical descriptors-mean, mode, median, variance, skewness, kurtosis, coefficient of variation (CoV), and entropy-were computed and normalized relative to adjacent healthy mucosa. Group differences were analyzed using MANOVA and effect size metrics (Cohen's d, eta squared). A support vector machine (SVM) with a Gaussian kernel was trained using five-fold cross-validation to classify lesions as benign or malignant based on the extracted features.

Statistical analysis revealed significant differences between benign and malignant groups for all features except skewness (p < 0.001). Entropy, kurtosis, and CoV showed the largest effect sizes, with entropy notably higher in malignant lesions and kurtosis higher in benign ones. The SVM model achieved a sensitivity of 99.2%, specificity of 81.4%, overall accuracy of 90.5%, and an AUC of 0.939, demonstrating high diagnostic performance in distinguishing malignant from benign oral mucosal lesions based on surface texture analysis.

Surface texture features, particularly entropy and kurtosis, offer promising diagnostic indicators for distinguishing malignant from benign lesions. SVM classifier demonstrated robust performance using these parameters.

This study highlights surface texture as an objective, underexplored diagnostic parameter. Integrating surface topography into clinical assessments and AI-based tools may enhance early detection and diagnostic accuracy in oral cancer screening.