DeepHistoNet: A robust deep-learning model for the classification of hepatocellular, lung, and colon carcinoma

In recent days, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) require more attention since they require specialized infrastructure for treatment. As per the cancer population registry estimate, nearly 800,000 new cancer cases will be detected yearly. The statistics alarm the need for early cancer detection and diagnosis. Cancer identification can be made either through manual efforts or by computer-aided algorithms. Manual efforts-based cancer detection is labor intensive and also offers more time complexity. In contrast, computer-aided algorithms offer feasibility in reducing time and manual efforts. With the motivation to develop a computer-aided diagnosis system for NCD, we developed a cancer detection methodology. In the present article, a deep learning (DL)-based cancer identification model is developed. In DL-based architectures, the features are generally extracted using convolutional neural networks. The proposed attention-guided, densely connected residual, and dilated convolution deep neural network called DeepHistoNet acquire precise patterns for classification. Experimentation has been carried out on Kasturba Medical College (KMC), TCGA-LIHC, and LC25000 datasets to prove the robustness of the model. Performance evaluation metrics like F1-score, sensitivity, specificity, recall, and accuracy validate the experimentation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DeepHistoNet model outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods. The proposed model has been able to classify the KMC liver dataset with 97.1% accuracy and 0.9867 value of area under the curve-receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC), which is the best result obtained compared to the state-of-the-art techniques. The performance of the DeepHistoNet has been even better on the LC25000 dataset. On the LC25000 dataset, the proposed model achieved 99.8% classification accuracy. To our knowledge, DeepHistoNet is a novel approach for multiple histopathological image classification. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: A novel robust DL model is proposed for histopathological image carcinoma classification. The precise patterns for accurate classification are extracted using dense cross-connected residual blocks. Spatial attention is provided to the network so that the spatial information is not lost during the feature extraction. DeepHistoNet is trained and evaluated on the liver, lung, and colon histopathology datasets to demonstrate its resilience. The results are promising and outperform state-of-the-art techniques. The proposed methodology has obtained the AUC-ROC value of 0.9867 with a classification accuracy of 97.1% on the KMC dataset. The proposed DeepHistoNet has classified the LC25000 dataset with 99.8% accuracy. The results are the best obtained till date.