Classification of Lung and Colon Cancer Histopathological Images Using Global Context Attention Based Convolutional Neural Network

The malignant neoplastic malady known as cancer appears to exhibit a significantly elevated rate of mortality owing to its virulence and pronounced propensity for metastasis. To augment the diagnostic efficacy, research endeavors have been undertaken utilizing complex deep learning architectures. However, the performance of these efforts remains circumscribed by smaller dataset size, quality of the data, the interclass variations present between lung adenocarcinoma and lung squamous cell carcinoma, and the complexity of deploying to mobile devices and failure to address both image and patient level accuracy measurements. To surmount these obstacles, the present study proposes a stage-based method for enhancing the images, in conjunction with utilizing a global context attention-guided convolutional neural network that effectively captures both channel and spatial information and semantic information extracted from the input image. Implementing the proposed methodology increased total image level accuracy to 99.76% and a patient level accuracy of 96.5%, a metric that has yet to be previously quantified. The addition of the global context attention module decreases the model’s parameter count by 0.47 million, reduces the computational costs by saving 10.54 million floating point operations per second (FLOPs) and 10.72 million multiply-accumulate operations (MACs), and results in a 0.03s improvement in inference time. Furthermore, this module enhances both image level and patient level accuracy, boosting them by 2.84% and 3.17%, respectively, compared to using only the convolutional block attention module in the baseline convolutional neural network. Consequently, this modification renders the model highly suitable for deployment on mobile devices due to its adaptability. Our findings provide supporting evidence for the potential of this method to serve as a noninvasive screening tool capable of reliably classifying lung and colon cancer subtypes.