Histopathological Cancer Detection Using Intra-Domain Transfer Learning and Ensemble Learning

Cancer is a leading global cause of death. Histopathology image analysis is widely recognized as the gold standard for cancer diagnosis, playing a crucial role in early detection and reducing mortality rates. However, this diagnostic task is performed manually by pathologists, leading to high human errors and variabilities due to the huge number of images to screen and tissue complexities. With the emergence of deep learning, specifically the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), in computer-aided diagnosis, there is a growing interest from the medical community to automate the labor-intensive manual image screening. Despite its promising performance, deep learning models still encounter challenges when it comes to extracting comprehensive histopathological features for optimal results. To tackle this issue, our study introduces deep learning models based on intra-domain transfer learning and ensemble learning. We evaluated these models on public histopathology datasets, including Gastric Histopathology Sub-size Image Database (GasHisSDB), Chaoyang colorectal, and Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma (CPTAC-CCRCC). Our models achieved state-of-the-art accuracy: 99.78% on GasHisSDB, 85.69% on Chaoyang, and 99.17% on CPTAC-CCRCC. These results highlight our models’ ability to extract rich features and perform well on low-resolution histopathology images. Thus, our models have the potential to assist pathologists, reduce their workload, and enhance patient survival rates.