Comparative Evaluation of Fusion Strategies Using Multi-Pretrained Deep Learning Fusion-Based (MPDLF) Model for Histopathology Image Classification
Fatma Alshohoumi, Abdullah Al-Hamdani · Applied Sciences · 2026
Histopathological image analysis remains the cornerstone of cancer diagnosis; however, manual assessment is challenged by stain variability, differences in imaging magnification, and complex morphological patterns. The proposed multi-pretrained deep learning fusion (MPDLF) approach combines two widely used CNN architectures: ResNet50, which captures deeper semantic representations, and VGG16, which extracts fine-grained details. This work differs from previous fusion studies by providing a controlled evaluation of early, intermediate, and late fusion for integrating two pretrained CNN backbones (ResNet50 and VGG16) under single-modality histopathology constraints. To isolate the fusion effect, identical training settings are used across three public H&E datasets. Early fusion achieved the best test performance for the two primary tasks reported here: breast cancer binary classification (accuracy = 0.9070, 95% CI: 0.8742–0.9404; AUC = 0.9707, 95% CI: 0.9541–0.9844) and renal clear cell carcinoma (RCCC) five-class grading (accuracy = 0.8792, 95% CI: 0.8529–0.9041; AUC (OvR, macro) = 0.9895, 95% CI: 0.9859–0.9927). Future work will extend these experiments to additional magnification levels (100×, 200×, and 400×) for breast cancer histopathology images and explore advanced hybrid fusion strategies across different histopathology datasets.