Enhancing breast cancer diagnosis: transfer learning on DenseNet with neural hashing for histopathology fine-grained image classification.

Breast cancer is one of the most common types of cancer worldwide. The number of breast cancer cases highlights the importance of disease management at various levels. One complementary method for breast cancer classification is microscopic imaging. Manual histopathological image analysis is time-consuming and prone to human errors. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) has emerged as a popular and feasible solution for analyzing medical images due to extensive advancements. Microscopic image analysis can assist physicians in more accurate diagnosis. However, the performance of CAD models needs improvement for practical purposes. In the proposed approach, a baseline model called DenseNet is considered for extracting features from histopathological images. The pre-trained DenseNet model alone is not sufficient for fine-grained feature discrimination between benign and malignant histopathological image samples. Therefore, two hash layers are incorporated at the end of the network to enhance feature separability of the two classes, benign and malignant. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on the BreakHis histopathological image dataset, with magnifications of 40 × , 100 × , 200 × , and 400 × . The evaluation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to other existing approaches. Furthermore, the interpretability of the proposed approach is demonstrated using the LIME technique.