Domain and Histopathology Adaptations-Based Classification for Malignancy Grading System

Accurate proliferation rate quantification can be used to devise an appropriate treatment for breast cancer. Pathologists use breast tissue biopsy glass slides stained with hematoxylin and eosin to obtain grading information. However, this manual evaluation may lead to high costs and be ineffective because diagnosis depends on the facility and the pathologists' insights and experiences. Convolutional neural network acts as a computer-based observer to improve clinicians' capacity in grading breast cancer. Therefore, this study proposes a novel scheme for automatic breast cancer malignancy grading from invasive ductal carcinoma. The proposed classifiers implement multistage transfer learning incorporating domain and histopathologic transformations. Domain adaptation using pretrained models, such as InceptionResNetV2, InceptionV3, NASNet-Large, ResNet50, ResNet101, VGG19, and Xception, was applied to classify the ×40 magnification BreaKHis data set into eight classes. Subsequently, InceptionV3 and Xception, which contain the domain and histopathology pretrained weights, were determined to be the best for this study and used to categorize the Databiox database into grades 1, 2, or 3. To provide a comprehensive report, this study offered a patchless automated grading system for magnification-dependent and magnification-independent classifications. With an overall accuracy (means ± SD) of 90.17% ± 3.08% to 97.67% ± 1.09% and an F₁ score of 0.9013 to 0.9760 for magnification-dependent classification, the classifiers in this work achieved outstanding performance. The proposed approach could be used for breast cancer grading systems in clinical settings.