Feasibility study of ResNet‐50 in the distinction of intraoral neural tumors using histopathological images

Background Neural tumors are difficult to distinguish based solely on cellularity and often require immunohistochemical staining to aid in identifying the cell lineage. This article investigates the potential of a Convolutional Neural Network for the histopathological classification of the three most prevalent benign neural tumor types: neurofibroma, perineurioma, and schwannoma. Methods A model was developed, trained, and evaluated for classification using the ResNet‐50 architecture, with a database of 30 whole‐slide images stained in hematoxylin and eosin (106, 782 patches were generated from and divided among the training, validation, and testing subsets, with strategies to avoid data leakage). Results The model achieved an accuracy of 70% (64% normalized), and showed satisfactory results for differentiating two of the three classes, reaching approximately 97% and 77% as true positives for neurofibroma and schwannoma classes, respectively, and only 7% for perineurioma class. The AUROC curves for neurofibroma and schwannoma classes was 0.83%, and 0.74% for perineurioma. However, the specificity rate for the perineurioma class was greater (83%) than in the other two classes (neurofibroma with 61%, and schwannoma with 60%). Conclusion This investigation demonstrated significant potential for proficient performance with a limitation regarding the perineurioma class (the limited feature variability observed contributed to a lower performance).