Dual-Activated Lightweight Attention ResNet50 for Automatic Histopathology Breast Cancer Image Classification

Automatic breast cancer classification in histopathology images is crucial for precise diagnosis and treatment planning. Recently, classification approaches based on the ResNet architecture have gained popularity for significantly improving accuracy by using skip connections to mitigate vanishing gradient problems, thereby integrating low-level and high-level feature information. Nevertheless, the conventional ResNet architecture faces challenges such as data imbalance and limited interpretability, necessitating cross-domain knowledge and collaboration among medical experts. This study effectively addresses these challenges by introducing a novel method for breast cancer classification, the Dual-Activated Lightweight Attention ResNet50 (DALAResNet50). It integrates a pre-trained ResNet50 model with a lightweight attention mechanism, embedding an attention module in the fourth layer of ResNet50 and incorporating two fully connected layers with LeakyReLU and ReLU activation functions to enhance feature learning capabilities. The DALAResNet50 method was tested on breast cancer histopathology images from the BreakHis Database across magnification factors of 40X, 100X, 200X, and 400X, achieving accuracies of 98.5%, 98.7%, 97.9%, and 94.3%, respectively. It was also compared with established deep learning models such as SEResNet50, DenseNet121, VGG16, VGG16Inception, ViT, Swin-Transformer, Dinov2_Vitb14, and ResNet50. The results demonstrate that DALAResNet50 surpasses these models in precision, accuracy, recall, F1 score, and GMean, proving its robustness and applicability across various magnifications and handling imbalanced breast cancer datasets.