Breast Cancer Classification from Histopathological Images Using Patch-Based Deep Learning Modeling

Accurate detection and classification of breast cancer is a critical task in medical imaging due to the complexity of breast tissues. Due to automatic feature extraction ability, deep learning methods have been successfully applied in different areas, especially in the field of medical imaging. In this study, a novel patch-based deep learning method called Pa-DBN-BC is proposed to detect and classify breast cancer on histopathology images using the Deep Belief Network (DBN). Features are extracted through an unsupervised pre-training and supervised fine-tuning phase. The network automatically extracts features from image patches. Logistic regression is used to classify the patches from histopathology images. The features extracted from the patches are fed to the model as input and the model presents the result as a probability matrix as either a positive sample (cancer) or a negative sample (background). The proposed model is trained and tested on the whole slide histopathology image dataset having images from four different data cohorts and achieved an accuracy of 86%. Consequently, the proposed method is better than the traditional ones, as it automatically learns the best possible features and experimental results show that the model outperformed the previously proposed deep learning methods.