Deep Learning Techniques for the Classification of Colorectal Cancer Tissue

Abstract

It is very important to make an objective evaluation of colorectal cancer histological images. Current approaches are generally based on the use of different combinations of textual features and classifiers to assess the classification performance, or transfer learning to classify different organizational types. However, since histological images contain multiple tissue types and characteristics, classification is still challenging. In this study, we proposed the best classification methodology based on the selected optimizer and modified the parameters of CNN methods. Then, we used deep learning technology to distinguish between healthy and diseased large intestine tissues. Firstly, we trained a neural network and compared the network architecture optimizers. Secondly, we modified the parameters of the network layer to optimize the superior architecture. Finally, we compared our well-trained deep learning methods on two different histological image open datasets, which comprised 5000 H&E images of colorectal cancer. The other dataset was composed of nine organizational categories of 100,000 images with an external validation of 7180 images. The results showed that the accuracy of the recognition of histopathological images was significantly better than that of existing methods. Therefore, this method is expected to have great potential to assist physicians to make clinical diagnoses and reduce the number of disparate assessments based on the use of artificial intelligence to classify colorectal cancer tissue.