Comparison of single and ensemble-based convolutional neural networks for cancerous image classification

In this work, we investigated the ability of several Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models for predicting the spread of cancer using medical images. We used a dataset released by the Kaggle, namely PatchCamelyon. The dataset consists of 220,025 pathology images digitized by a tissue scanner. A clinical expert labeled each image as cancerous or non-cancerous. We used 70% of the images as a training set and 30% of them as a validation set. We design three models based on three commonly used modules: VGG, Inception, and Residual Network (ResNet), to develop an ensemble model and implement a voting system to determine the final decision. Then, we compared the performance of this ensemble model to the performance of each single model. Additionally, we used a weighted majority voting system, where the final prediction is equal to the weighted average of the prediction produced by each network. Our results show that the classification of the two ensemble models reaches 96%. Thus these results prove that the ensemble model outperforms single network architectures.