Classification of Histopathological Images from Breast Cancer Patients Using Deep Learning: A Comparative Analysis

Cancer, a leading cause of mortality, is distinguished by the multi-stage conversion of healthy cells into cancer cells. Discovery of the disease early can significantly enhance the possibility of survival. Histology is a procedure where the tissue of interest is first surgically removed from a patient and cut into thin slices. A pathologist will then mount these slices on glass slides, stain them with specialized dyes like hematoxylin and eosin (H&E), and then inspect the slides under a microscope. Unfortunately, a manual analysis of histopathology images during breast cancer biopsy is time consuming. Literature suggests that automated techniques based on deep learning algorithms with artificial intelligence can be used to increase the speed and accuracy of detection of abnormalities within the histopathological specimens obtained from breast cancer patients. This paper highlights some recent work on such algorithms, a comparative study on various deep learning methods is provided. For the present study the breast cancer histopathological database (BreakHis) is used. These images are processed to enhance the inherent features, classified and an evaluation is carried out regarding the accuracy of the algorithm. Three convolutional neural network (CNN) models, visual geometry group (VGG19), densely connected convolutional networks (DenseNet201), and residual neural network (ResNet50V2), were employed while analyzing the images. Of these the DenseNet201 model performed better than other models and attained an accuracy of 91.3%. The paper includes a review of different classification techniques based on machine learning methods including CNN-based models and some of which may replace manual breast cancer diagnosis and detection.