Breast cancer histology images classification: Training from scratch or transfer learning?

We demonstrated the ability of transfer learning in comparison with the fully-trained network on the histopathological imaging modality by considering three pre-trained networks: VGG16, VGG19, and ResNet50 and analyzed their behavior for magnification independent breast cancer classification. Concurrently, we examined the effect of training–testing data size on the performance of considered networks. A fine-tuned pre-trained VGG16 with logistic regression classifier yielded the best performance with 92.60% accuracy, 95.65% area under ROC curve (AUC), and 95.95% accuracy precision score (APS) for 90%–10% training–testing data splitting. Layer-wise fine-tuning and different weight initialization schemes can be a future aspect of this study.