AI‐Powered TAT‐Net Hyperspectral Imaging for Rapid and Accurate Differentiation of Sinonasal Inverted Papilloma and Malignancy
Hao‐Miao Zhao, Jia‐Chang Kong, Yun‐Ze Li, Wei Li, Xin FengABSTRACT
Background
Sinonasal inverted papilloma (IP) and malignancies share overlapping clinical and endoscopic features, and conventional histopathology frequently requires time‐consuming adjunct immunohistochemistry. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) can capture subtle spectral changes associated with malignant transformation that are not apparent on routine hematoxylin‐eosin (H&E) staining.
Methods
In this retrospective single‐center study, 176 H&E‐stained surgical specimens from 176 patients (89 with IP and 87 with sinonasal malignancies) were allocated at the patient/specimen level to training, validation, and test sets in a 6:2:2 ratio before any hyperspectral data processing. Hyperspectral calibration, selection of regions of interest (ROIs), spectral preprocessing, feature extraction, and quality control yielded 9,296 eligible ROI‐level hyperspectral samples: 5,578 in the training set, 1,859 in the validation set, and 1,859 in the test set. Joint spectral‐texture features were evaluated using several reference deep‐learning models and a Transformer‐Attention‐based Network (TAT‐Net). The primary outcome was the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) in the test set.
Results
HSI revealed distinct spectral signatures between IP and sinonasal malignancies. All deep learning models demonstrated good discriminative performance (AUCs ≥ 0.85), with TAT‐Net achieving the best overall performance. On the independent test set, TAT‐Net achieved an AUC of 0.9656 (95% CI: 0.9571–0.9741) for distinguishing between IP and sinonasal malignancies.
Conclusion
AI‐powered TAT‐Net analysis of HSI enables rapid and accurate differentiation between IP and sinonasal malignancies on routine H&E sections. This approach has the potential to shorten diagnostic workflows, support early decision‐making, and help standardize the evaluation of sinonasal tumors.