Histopathology-Based Prostate Cancer Classification Using ResNet: A Comprehensive Deep Learning Analysis

Prostate cancer is the most prevalent solid tumor in males and one of the most common causes of male mortality. It is the most common type of cancer in men, a major global public health issue, and accounts for up to 7.3% of all male cancer diagnoses worldwide. To optimize patient outcomes and ensure therapeutic success, an accurate diagnosis must be made promptly. To achieve this, we focused on using ResNet50, a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, to analyze prostate histological images to classify prostate cancer. ResNet50, due to its efficiency in medical image classification, was used to classify the histological images as benign or malignant. In this study, a total of 1276 prostate biopsy images were used on the ResNet50 model. We employed evaluation metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. The results showed that the ResNet50 model performed excellently with an overall accuracy of 0.98, 1.00 as precision, 0.98 as recall, and 0.97 as F1 score for benign. The malignant histological image has 0.99, 0.98, and 0.97 as precision, recall, and F1 scores. It also recorded a 95% confidence interval (CI) for accuracy as (0.91, 1.00) and a performance gain of 4.26% compared to MobileNet and CNN-RNN. The result of our model was also compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) DL models to ensure robustness. This study has demonstrated the potential of the ResNet50 model in the classification of prostate cancer. Again, the clinical integration of the results of this study will aid decision-makers in enhancing patient outcomes.