Evaluating deep learning models for breast cancer classification: a comparative study
Sania Eskandari, Ali Eslamian, Nusrat Munia, Amjad Alqarni, Qiang Cheng · 2025
The classification of histopathological images is crucial for the early and precise detection of breast cancer. This study investigates the efficiency of deep learning models in distinguishing between Invasive Ductal Carcinoma (IDC) and non-IDC in histopathology slides. We conducted a thorough comparison examination of eight sophisticated models: ResNet-50, DenseNet-121, ResNeXt-50, Vision Transformer (ViT), GoogLeNet (Inception v3), EfficientNet, MobileNet, and SqueezeNet. This analysis was carried out using a large dataset of 277,524 image patches. Our research makes a substantial contribution to the field by offering a comprehensive assessment of the performance of each model. We particularly highlight the exceptional efficacy of attention-based mechanisms in the ViT model, which achieved a remarkable validation accuracy of 94%, surpassing conventional convolutional networks. This study highlights the promise of advanced machine learning approaches in clinical settings, offering improved precision as well as efficiency in breast cancer diagnosis.