Deep and Lightweight Neural Network for Histopathological Image Classification

Breast cancer is a fatal disease affecting women, and early detection and proper treatment are crucial. Classifying medical images correctly is the first and most important step in the cancer diagnosis stage. Deep learning-based classification methods in various domains demonstrate advances in accuracy. However, as deep learning improves, the layers of neural networks get deeper, raising challenges, such as overfitting and gradient vanishing. For instance, a medical image is simpler than an ordinary one, making it vulnerable to overfitting issues. We present breast histopathological classification methods with two deep neural networks, Xception and LightXception with aid of voting schemes over split images. Most deep neural networks classify thousands classes of images, but the breast histopathological image classes are far fewer than those of other image classification tasks. Because the BreakHis dataset is relatively simpler than typical image datasets, such as ImageNet, applying the conventional highly deep neural networks may suffer from the aforementioned overfitting or gradient vanishing problems. Additionally, highly deep neural networks require more resources, leading to high computational costs. Consequently, we propose a new network; LightXception by cutting off layers at the bottom of the Xception network and reducing the number of channels of convolution filters. LightXception has only about 35% of parameters compared to those of the original Xception network with minimal expense on performance. Based on images with 100X magnification factor, the performance comparisons for Xception vs. LightXception are 97.42% vs. 97.31% on classification accuracy, 97.42% vs. 97.42% on recall, and 99.26% vs. 98.67% of precision.