A novel embedded kernel CNN-PCFF algorithm for breast cancer pathological image classification

Early screening of breast cancer through image recognition technology can significantly increase the survival rate of patients. Therefore, breast cancer pathological image is of great significance for medical diagnosis and clinical research. In recent years, numerous deep learning models have been applied to breast cancer image classification, with deep CNN being a typical representative. Due to the use of multi-depth small convolutional kernels in mainstream CNN architectures such as VGG and Inception, the obtained image features often have high dimensionality. Although high dimensionality can bring more fine-grained features, it also increases the computational complexity of subsequent classifiers and may even lead to the curse of dimensionality and overfitting. To address these issues, a novel embedded kernel CNN principal component feature fusion (CNN-PCFF) algorithm is proposed. The constructed kernel function is embedded in the principal component analysis to form the multi-kernel principal component. Multi-kernel principal component analysis is used to fuse the high dimensional features obtained from the convolution base into some representative comprehensive variables, which are called kernel principal components, so as to achieve the purpose of dimensionality reduction. Any type of classifier can be added based on multi-kernel principal components. Through experimental analysis on two public breast cancer image datasets, the results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the performance of the current mainstream CNN architecture and subsequent classifiers. Therefore, the proposed algorithm in this paper is an effective tool for the classification of breast cancer pathological images.