Fine-Grained Breast Cancer Classification With Bilinear Convolutional Neural Networks (BCNNs)

Classification of histopathological images of cancer is challenging even for well-trained professionals, due to the fine-grained variability of the disease. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) showed great potential for classification of a number of the highly variable fine-grained objects. In this study, we introduce a Bilinear Convolutional Neural Networks (BCNNs) based deep learning method for fine-grained classification of breast cancer histopathological images. We evaluated our model by comparison with several deep learning algorithms for fine-grained classification. We used bilinear pooling to aggregate a large number of orderless features without taking into consideration the disease location. The experimental results on BreaKHis, a publicly available breast cancer dataset, showed that our method is highly accurate with 99.24% and 95.95% accuracy in binary and in fine-grained classification, respectively.