Multi-Level Batch Normalization in Deep Networks for Invasive Ductal Carcinoma Cell Discrimination in Histopathology Images

Breast cancer is the most diagnosed cancer and the most predominant cause of death in women worldwide. Imaging techniques such as breast cancer pathology helps in the diagnosis and monitoring of the disease. However identification of malignant cells can be challenging given the high heterogeneity in tissue absorption from staining agents. In this work, we present a novel approach for Invasive Ductal Carcinoma (IDC) cells discrimination in histopathology slides. We propose a model derived from the Inception architecture, proposing a multi-level batch normalization module between each convolutional steps. This module was used as a base block for feature extraction in a CNN architecture. We used the open IDC dataset in which we obtained a balanced accuracy of 0.89 and an F1 score of 0.90, thus surpassing recent state of the art classification algorithms tested on this public dataset.