Utilization of artificial intelligence-assisted histopathological detection in surveillance of oral squamous cell carcinoma staging: A narrative review

Background: Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is defined as an oral malignancy with worldwide prevalence of 90%. In 2018, the number of cases observed is 354.864 with 177.384 deaths globally. Early diagnosis for determining OSCC stage due to histopathological examination is required to sustain prognosis and minimize mortality. Determining the stage is mostly done manually and highly dependent on skill and experiences of the pathologist thus having a high tendency of misdiagnosis. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology that modifies machines with human-like intelligence thus making them able to solve the tasks. Utilization of AI in analyzing histopathological samples is known to give such a precision analysis then diagnosing the OSCC stage accurately Purpose: This study describes utilization of AI-assisted histopathological detection in determining OSCC staging. Review: Developmental process of OSCC begins with gene damage causing disruption of cell regulation, manifesting in impaired differentiation and proliferation of keratinocytes in the epithelium which is characterized by keratin pearl formation. AI-assisted histopathological detection is able to identify the percentage of keratinization and keratin pearls in histopathological images by convolutional neural network (CNN). CNN is a deep learning architecture specifically designed to recognize two-dimensional visual patterns with minimal preprocessing. CNN works by analyzing input in the form of visual images from histopathological images and producing output as keratinization percentage in related samples then being used to determine the staging of OSCC. Conclusion: AI-assisted histopathological detection may potential to be used in determining OSCC staging.