Gastric Cancer Detection with Ensemble Learning on Digital Pathology: Use Case of Gastric Cancer on GasHisSDB Dataset

Abstract

Gastric cancer has become a serious worldwide health concern, emphasizing the crucial importance of early diagnosis measures to improve patient outcomes. While traditional histological image analysis is regarded as the clinical gold standard, it is labour intensive and manual. In recognition of this problem, there has been a rise in interest in the use of computer-aided diagnostic tools to help pathologists with their diagnostic efforts. In particular, deep learning (DL) has emerged as a promising solution in this sector. However, current DL models are still restricted in their ability to extract extensive visual characteristics for correct categorization. To address this limitation, this study proposes the use of ensemble models, which incorporate the capabilities of several deep-learning architectures and use aggregate knowledge of many models to improve classification performance, allowing for more accurate and efficient gastric cancer detection. To determine how well these proposed models performed, this study compared them with other works, all of which were based on the Gastric Histopathology Sub-Size Images Database, a publicly available dataset for gastric cancer. This research demonstrates that the ensemble models achieved a high detection accuracy across all sub-databases, with an average accuracy exceeding 99%. Specifically, ResNet50, VGGNet, and ResNet34 performed better than EfficientNet and VitNet. For the 80 × 80-pixel sub-database, ResNet34 exhibited an accuracy of approximately 93%, VGGNet achieved 94%, and the ensemble model excelled with 99%. In the 120 × 120-pixel sub-database, the ensemble model showed 99% accuracy, VGGNet 97%, and ResNet50 approximately 97%. For the 160 × 160-pixel sub-database, the ensemble model again achieved 99% accuracy, VGGNet 98%, ResNet50 98%, and EfficientNet 92%, highlighting the ensemble model’s superior performance across all resolutions. Overall, the ensemble model consistently provided an accuracy of 99% across the three sub-pixel categories. These findings show that ensemble models may successfully detect critical characteristics from smaller patches and achieve high performance. The findings will help pathologists diagnose gastric cancer using histopathological images, leading to earlier identification and higher patient survival rates.