Laryngoscopy is a medical procedure for obtaining a view of the human larynx. It is challenging for clinicians to distinguish laryngeal neoplasms by human visual observation. Recent deep learning methods can assist clinicians in improving the accuracy of distinguishing. However, existed methods are often trained on large-scale private datasets, while other researchers and hospitals can neither access these private datasets nor afford to build such large-scale datasets. In this paper, we focus on identifying laryngeal neoplasms under the “small data” regime, which is more important for many small hospitals to investigate deep learning models for diagnosis.

We build an extremely small dataset consisting of 279 laryngoscopic images of different categories. We found that traditional deep learning models for image classification cannot achieve satisfactory performance for small data, due to the great variability of recording laryngoscopic images and the small area of the neoplasms. To address these difficulties, we propose to employ object detection methods for this small data problem. Concretely, a Faster R-CNN is implemented here, which combines the DropBlock regularization technique to alleviate overfitting additionally.

Compared to previous methods, our model is more robust to overfitting and can predict the location and category of detected neoplasms simultaneously. Our method achieves 73.00% overall accuracy, which is higher than the average of clinicians (65.05%) and the recent state-of-the-art classification method (65.00%).

The proposed method shows great ability to detect both the category and location of neoplasms and can be served as a screening tool to help the final decisions of clinicians.