Improved Classification of Cancerous Histopathology Images using Color Channel Separation and Deep Learning

Oral cancer is ranked second most diagnosed cancer among Indian population and ranked sixth all around the world. Oral cancer is one of the deadliest cancers with high mortality rate and very less 5-year survival rates even after treatment. It becomes necessary to detect oral malignancies as early as possible so that timely treatment may be given to patient and increase the survival chances. In recent years deep learning based frameworks have been proposed by many researchers that can detect malignancies from medical images. In this paper we have proposed a deep learning-based framework which detects oral cancer from histopathology images very efficiently. We have designed our model to split the color channels and extract deep features from these individual channels rather than single combined channel with the help of Efficient NET B3. These features from different channels are fused by using feature fusion module designed as a layer and placed before dense layers of Efficient NET. The experiments were performed on our own dataset collected from hospitals. We also performed experiments of BreakHis, and ICML datasets to evaluate our model. The results produced by our model are very good as compared to previously reported results.