Patho-Net: enhancing breast cancer classification using deep learning and explainable artificial intelligence.

Abstract

Breast cancer is a disorder affecting women globally, and hence an early and precise classification is the best possible treatment to increase the survival rate. However, the breast cancer classification faced difficulties in scalability, fixed-size input images, and overfitting on limited datasets. To tackle these issues, this work proposes a Patho-Net model for breast cancer classification that overcomes the problems of scalability in color normalization, integrates the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) network with the U-Net architecture to process images without the need for resizing and computational efficiency, and addresses the overfitting problems. The proposed model collects and normalizes histopathology images using automated reference image selection with the Reinhard method for color standardization. Also, the Enhanced Adaptive Non-Local Means (EANLM) filtering is utilized for noise removal to preserve image features. These preprocessed images undergo semantic segmentation to isolate specific parts of an image, followed by feature extraction using an Improved Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (I-GLCM) to reveal fine patterns and textures in images. These features serve as input into the classification U-Net model integrated with GRU networks to improve the model performance. Finally, the classification result is expanded, and XAI is used for clear visual explanations of the model's predictions. The proposed Patho-Net model, which uses the 100X BreakHis dataset, achieves an accuracy of 98.90% in the classification of breast cancer.