Few-shot learning and explainable AI for colon cancer histopathology: A prototypical network with multi-technique
Asma Merabet1, Asma Saighi1, Zakaria Laboudi2
1Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Things Laboratory (LAIOA), University of Oum El Bouaghi, Oum El Bouaghi, 04000, Algeria; Department of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, University of Oum El Bouaghi, Oum El Bouaghi, 04000, Algeria.
Background:
Colon cancer diagnosis from histopathology is challenging due to limited annotated data and the lack of interpretability in deep models.
Objective:
We present a data-efficient framework combining few-shot learning and explainable AI for accurate and transparent diagnosis.
Methods:
A Prototypical Network with a ConvNeXt-Tiny backbone was trained on small colon-tissue image sets. Explanations from Grad-CAM and LIME were validated by a pathologist, and generalization was tested on an external dataset.
Results:
The model achieved 98.5 % accuracy in-domain and 90 % on the EBHI dataset, showing strong generalization.
Conclusions:
This few-shot and explainable model performs well with minimal data and generates clinically interpretable visual outputs, supporting its potential for reliable colon cancer diagnosis.
