Fusing global context with multiscale context for enhanced breast cancer classification

Breast cancer is the second most common type of cancer among women. Prompt detection of breast cancer can impede its advancement to more advanced phases, thereby elevating the probability of favorable treatment consequences. Histopathological images are commonly used for breast cancer classification due to their detailed cellular information. Existing diagnostic approaches rely on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) which are limited to local context resulting in a lower classification accuracy. Therefore, we present a fusion model composed of a Vision Transformer (ViT) and custom Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) network with an attention mechanism for effectively classifying breast cancer from histopathological images. ViT enables the model to attain global features, while the ASPP network accommodates multiscale features. Fusing the features derived from the models resulted in a robust breast cancer classifier. With the help of five-stage image preprocessing technique, the proposed model achieved 100% accuracy in classifying breast cancer on the BreakHis dataset at 100X and 400X magnification factors. On 40X and 200X magnifications, the model achieved 99.25% and 98.26% classification accuracy respectively. With a commendable classification efficacy on histopathological images, the model can be considered a dependable option for proficient breast cancer classification.