A lightweight CNN for colon cancer tissue classification and visualization

Abstract

Introduction: Colon cancer (CC) image classification plays a key role in the diagnostic process in clinical contexts, especially as computational medical solutions become the trend for future radiology and pathology practices. This study presents a novel lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model designed with effective data cleaning strategy for the classification and visualization of histopathology images of various colon cancer tissues. Methods: Addressing the critical need for efficient diagnostic tools in colon cancer detection, the proposed model leverages a non-pretrained architecture optimized for performance in resource-constrained environments. Utilizing the NCT-CRC-HE-100K and CRC-VAL-HE-7K datasets, this model employs a parametric Gaussian distribution-based data cleaning approach to enhance data quality by removing outliers. Results: With a total of 4,414,217 parameters and a total size of 16.9 megabytes, the model achieves a test accuracy of 0.990 ± 0.003 with 95% level of confidence, which demonstrates high precision, recall, specificity, and F1 scores across various tissue classes. Discussion: Comparative analysis with benchmark studies underscores the model’s effectiveness, while discussions on underfitting and overfitting provide insights into potential fine-tuning strategies. This research presents a robust, lightweight solution for colon cancer histopathology image classification, offering a foundation for future advancements in colon cancer diagnostics with result visualization.