Identification of Colon Cancer Using Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Convolutional Neural Network Based on Shearlet Transform

Colon cancer identification is of great significance in medical diagnosis. Real-time, objective and accurate inspection results will facilitate medical professionals to explore symptomatic treatment promptly. However, the existing methods depend on hand-crafted features which require extensive professional expertise and long inspection period. Therefore, we propose a multi-scale feature fusion convolutional neural network (MFF-CNN) based on shearlet transform to identify histopathological image of colon cancer. The characteristic of the framework is the shearlet coefficients of histopathological image in multiple decomposition scales were extracted as supplementary feature which were also fed to the network with the original pathological image. After feature learning and feature fusion, the MFF-CNN based on shearlet transform can achieve the identification accuracy of 96% and average F-1 score of 0.9594 for colorectal adenocarcinoma epithelium (TUM) and normal colon mucosa (NORM). The false negative rate and false positive rate can be reduced to 5.5% and 2.5%, respectively. The superior performance of the network opens a new perspectives for real-time, objective and accurate diagnosis of cancer.