convoHER2: A Deep Neural Network for Multi-Stage Classification of HER2 Breast Cancer

Generally, human epidermal growth factor 2 (HER2) breast cancer is more aggressive than other kinds of breast cancer. Currently, HER2 breast cancer is detected using variety of medical test which are most expensive. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop a computational model named convoHER2 for detecting HER2 breast cancer with image data using convolution neural network (CNN). Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) and immunohistochemical (IHC) stained images were used as raw data from the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) benchmark dataset. This dataset consists of 4873 images of H&E and IHC. Among all images of the dataset, 3896 and 977 images were applied to train and test the convoHER2 model, respectively. All images of this dataset are resized due to high resolution of the image for forming better detection performance of convoHER2 model. Moreover, the dataset is classified into four different labels (0+, 1+, 2+, 3+) for identifying the grade of detected HER2 breast cancer. The convoHER2 model is able to detect HER2 cancer and its grade with accuracy 85% and 88% using H&E images and IHC images, respectively. The outcomes of this study determined that the HER2 cancer detecting rates of the convoHER2 model are much enough to provide better diagnosis to the patient for recovering their HER2 breast cancer in future.