Explainable AI for Oral Cancer Diagnosis: Multiclass Classification of Histopathology Images and Grad-CAM...

Oral cancer is typically diagnosed through histological examination; however, the primary issue with this type of procedure is tumor heterogeneity, where a subjective aspect of the examination may have a direct effect on the treatment plan for a patient. To reduce inter- and intra-observer variability, artificial intelligence algorithms are often used as computational aids in tumor classification and diagnosis. This research proposes a two-step approach for automatic multiclass grading using oral histopathology images (the first step) and Grad-CAM visualization (the second step) to assist clinicians in diagnosing oral squamous cell carcinoma. The Xception architecture achieved the highest classification values of 0.929 (±σ = 0.087) AUC_macro and 0.942 (±σ = 0.074) AUC_micro. Additionally, Grad-CAM provided visual explanations of the model's predictions by highlighting the precise areas of histopathology images that influenced the model's decision. These results emphasize the potential of integrated AI algorithms in medical diagnostics, offering a more precise, dependable, and effective method for disease analysis.