Classification of histopathological images of breast cancer using an improved convolutional neural network model

Abstract

The accurately automatic classification of medical pathological images has always been an important problem in the field of deep learning. However, the traditional manual extraction of features and image classification usually requires in-depth knowledge and more professional researchers to extract and calculate high-quality image features. This kind of operation generally takes a lot of time and the classification effect is not ideal. In order to solve these problems, this study proposes and tests an improved network model DenseNet-201-MSD to accomplish the task of classification of medical pathological images of breast cancer. First, the image is preprocessed, and the traditional pooling layer is replaced by multiple scaling decomposition to prevent overfitting due to the large dimension of the image data set. Second, the BN algorithm is added before the activation function Softmax and Adam is used in the optimizer to optimize performance of the network model and improve image recognition accuracy of the network model. By verifying the performance of the model using the BreakHis dataset, the new deep learning model yields image classification accuracy of 99.4%, 98.8%, 98.2%and 99.4%when applying to four different magnifications of pathological images, respectively. The study results demonstrate that this new classification method and deep learning model can effectively improve accuracy of pathological image classification, which indicates its potential value in future clinical application.