A Classification Benchmark for Artificial Intelligence Detection of Laryngeal Cancer from Patient Voice

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive benchmark suite for AI models detecting laryngeal cancer from patient voice, demonstrating promising accuracy and providing open-source resources to advance non-invasive diagnosis methods.

Contribution

It presents the first reproducible benchmark with 36 models for voice-based laryngeal cancer detection, including evaluation protocols and open-source datasets.

Findings

Best model achieves 83.7% balanced accuracy

Model sensitivity is 84.0%, specificity 83.3%

AUROC reaches 91.8%

Abstract

Cases of laryngeal cancer are predicted to rise significantly in the coming years. Current diagnostic pathways are inefficient, putting undue stress on both patients and the medical system. Artificial intelligence offers a promising solution by enabling non-invasive detection of laryngeal cancer from patient voice, which could help prioritise referrals more effectively. A major barrier in this field is the lack of reproducible methods. Our work addresses this challenge by introducing a benchmark suite comprising 36 models trained and evaluated on open-source datasets. These models classify patients with benign and malignant voice pathologies. All models are accessible in a public repository, providing a foundation for future research. We evaluate three algorithms and three audio feature sets, including both audio-only inputs and multimodal inputs incorporating demographic and symptom data. Our best model achieves a balanced accuracy of 83.7%, sensitivity of 84.0%, specificity of 83.3%, and AUROC of 91.8%.