A Circular Box-Based Deep Learning Model for the Identification of Signet Ring Cells from Histopathological Images

Signet ring cell (SRC) carcinoma is a particularly serious type of cancer that is a leading cause of death all over the world. SRC carcinoma has a more deceptive onset than other carcinomas and is mostly encountered in its later stages. Thus, the recognition of SRCs at their initial stages is a challenge because of different variants and sizes and illumination changes. The recognition process of SRCs at their early stages is costly because of the requirement for medical experts. A timely diagnosis is important because the level of the disease determines the severity, cure, and survival rate of victims. To tackle the current challenges, a deep learning (DL)-based methodology is proposed in this paper, i.e., custom CircleNet with ResNet-34 for SRC recognition and classification. We chose this method because of the circular shapes of SRCs and achieved better performance due to the CircleNet method. We utilized a challenging dataset for experimentation and performed augmentation to increase the dataset samples. The experiments were conducted using 35,000 images and attained 96.40% accuracy. We performed a comparative analysis and confirmed that our method outperforms the other methods.