Double transfer learning for breast cancer histopathologic image classification

Double transfer learning for breast cancer histopathologic image classification

De Matos, Jonathan and De S. Britto Jr., Alceu and Oliveira, Luiz E.S. and Koerich, Alessandro L.

arXiv 2019

Abstract : This work proposes a classification approach for breast cancer histopathologic images (HI) that uses transfer learning to extract features from HI using an Inception-v3 CNN pre-trained with ImageNet dataset. We also use transfer learning on training a support vector machine (SVM) classifier on a tissue labeled colorectal cancer dataset aiming to filter the patches from a breast cancer HI and remove the irrelevant ones. We show that removing irrelevant patches before training a second SVM classifier, improves the accuracy for classifying malign and benign tumors on breast cancer images. We are able to improve the classification accuracy in 3.7% using the feature extraction transfer learning and an additional 0.7% using the irrelevant patch elimination. The proposed approach outperforms the stateof-the-art in three out of the four magnification factors of the breast cancer dataset.