LiCT-Net: Lightweight Convolutional Transformer Network for Multiclass Breast Cancer Classification

Classification of multiclass breast cancer through histopathological images is indispensable and poses daunting challenges due to color inconsistencies, high appearance variations, and large inter-class similarities. Regardless of the success of traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs), they often fail to capture intricate patterns and local contextual information, respectively, while demanding high computational resources and data requirements. To mitigate these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight convo-lutional transformer network named LiCT-Net for multiclass breast cancer classification. The LiCT-Net introduces a local-global spatially-aware transformer layer and integrates it with a pre-trained FastViT model to effectively capture global and local contextual features, thereby facilitating learning fine-grained and intricate lesion patterns from histopathological images. The LiCT-Net is validated on a benchmark dataset and the experimental results and comparative analysis demonstrate its effectiveness. In specific, it achieves a higher accuracy of 96.16 %, 95.62 %, 95.25 %, and 94.21 % on <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$40\times, 100\times, 200\times$</tex>, and <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$400\times$</tex> magniflcations respectively,