A High Magnifications Histopathology Image Dataset for Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma Diagnosis and Prognosis

TL;DR

The paper introduces Multi-OSCC, a comprehensive histopathology image dataset of 1,325 OSCC patients with annotations for multiple diagnostic and prognostic tasks, enabling advanced deep learning research in oral cancer.

Contribution

It provides a large, annotated dataset combining diagnostic and prognostic information, and benchmarks various deep learning approaches for OSCC analysis.

Findings

Top models achieve 94.72% AUC for recurrence prediction.

Stain normalization improves diagnostic tasks but harms recurrence prediction.

Multi-task learning reduces AUC by 3.34% on average.

Abstract

Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma (OSCC) is a prevalent and aggressive malignancy where deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis and prognosis can enhance clinical assessments.However, existing publicly available OSCC datasets often suffer from limited patient cohorts and a restricted focus on either diagnostic or prognostic tasks, limiting the development of comprehensive and generalizable models. To bridge this gap, we introduce Multi-OSCC, a new histopathology image dataset comprising 1,325 OSCC patients, integrating both diagnostic and prognostic information to expand existing public resources. Each patient is represented by six high resolution histopathology images captured at x200, x400, and x1000 magnifications-two per magnification-covering both the core and edge tumor regions.The Multi-OSCC dataset is richly annotated for six critical clinical tasks: recurrence prediction (REC), lymph node metastasis (LNM), tumor differentiation (TD), tumor invasion (TI), cancer embolus (CE), and perineural invasion (PI). To benchmark this dataset, we systematically evaluate the impact of different visual encoders, multi-image fusion techniques, stain normalization, and multi-task learning frameworks. Our analysis yields several key insights: (1) The top-performing models achieve excellent results, with an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 94.72% for REC and 81.23% for TD, while all tasks surpass 70% AUC; (2) Stain normalization benefits diagnostic tasks but negatively affects recurrence prediction; (3) Multi-task learning incurs a 3.34% average AUC degradation compared to single-task models in our multi-task benchmark, underscoring the challenge of balancing multiple tasks in our dataset. To accelerate future research, we publicly release the Multi-OSCC dataset and baseline models at https://github.com/guanjinquan/OSCC-PathologyImageDataset.