A hybrid deep learning model EfficientNet with GRU for breast cancer detection from histopathology images

Breast cancer remains a significant global health challenge among women, with histopathological image analysis playing a critical role in early detection. However, existing diagnostic models often struggle to extract complex patterns from high-resolution tissue images, limiting their diagnostic accuracy and generalization. This study aims to develop a high-performance deep learning framework for accurate classification of breast cancer in histopathology images, addressing limitations in feature extraction and spatial dependency modeling. A hybrid deep learning model is proposed, integrating EfficientNetV2 for multi-scale feature extraction with a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) enhanced by an attention mechanism to model sequential dependencies. The model is trained and evaluated using the BreakHisand Camelyon17 dataset at 200× magnification. Evaluation metrics include precision, recall, F1-score, specificity, Intersection over Union (IoU), and accuracy. The proposed model achieved superior performance compared to existing architectures such as AlexNet, DenseNet, MobileNetV3, and EfficientNet. It attained a precision of 98.15%, recall of 95.68%, F1-score of 96.82%, specificity of 96%, IoU of 93.99%, and accuracy of 95.72% on the test set. The integration of EfficientNetV2 with GRU and attention mechanisms enables effective learning of spatial and contextual features, enhancing the accuracy and interpretability of breast cancer classification from histopathology images. This framework shows strong potential for aiding pathologists in real-time diagnostic workflows.