ShortNeXt: A novel method for accurate classification of colorectal cancer histopathology images

Cancer is a chaotic disease known as the plague of our age and there are many subtypes of the cancer. Cancer is commonly seen disorder and its mortality rate is very high. Therefore, many researchers have worked/studied on the cancer detection and threatment. To contribute cancer studies according to machine learning, we have presented a new generation convolutional neural network (CNN) termed ShortNeXt in this research. The presented ShortNeXt has inspired by ResNet, ConvNeXt and MobileNet architectures to use the advatnages these CNNs together. This model, which aims to extract robust feature map using convolution-based residual blocks, is named ShortNeXt because it incorporates more than one shortcut. The ShortNeXt architecture has four main stages and these stages are: (i) an input/stem, (ii) ShortNeXt, (iii) downsampling, and (iv) output. In this CNN architecture, convolution, batch normalization and the Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU) activation functions have been utilized. In this aspect, the implementation of the recommended ShortNeXt is simple. The stem stage uses a 4 × 4 sized convolution with stride 4 like ConvNeXt and Swin Transformer and this operation is named patchify operation. Additionally, a 2 × 2 patchify block has been used in the downsampling block. In the ShortNeXt block, an inverted bottleneck has been used, and both 1 × 1 and 3 × 3 convolution blocks are employed in the expansion phase. The output layer has increased the number of filters from 768 to 1280 by using pixel-wise convolution, drawing inspiration from MobileNetV2 and a final feature map with a length of 1280 has been obtained by deploying global average pooling (GAP). In the classification phase, fully connected and softmax operators have been used. To get comparative results about to the recommeden ShortNeXt, a publicly avaliable histopathological image dataset has been used and this dataset contains nine classes, and the proposed ShortNeXt has achieved 97.82% and 97.86% validation and test accuracy, respectively. The obtained results and findings openly showcases that ShortNeXt is an effective deep learning method for histopathological image classification for cancer detection/classification. • Novel triple-shortcut CNN achieves 98.2% accuracy with only 8.7M parameters. • Processes 714 histopathology images/second for efficient clinical deployment. • Outperforms transformers and ensemble methods on external validation data. • Grad-CAM visualization provides transparent diagnostic decision support.