The Xception model: A potential feature extractor in breast cancer histology images classification

Computer-assisted pathology analysis is an emerging field in health informatics and extremely important for effective treatment. Herein, we demonstrated the ability of the pre-trained Xception model for magnification-dependent breast cancer histopathological image classification in contrast to handcrafted approaches. The Xception model and SVM classifier with the ‘radial basis function’ kernel has achieved the best and consistent performance with the accuracy of 96.25%, 96.25%, 95.74%, and 94.11% for 40X, 100X, 200X and 400X level of magnification, respectively. A comparison with existing state-of-the-art techniques has been conducted based on accuracy, recall, precision, F1 score, area under ROC and precision–recall curve evaluation metrics.