End-to-End Deep Learning for Detecting Metastatic Breast Cancer in Axillary Lymph Node from Digital Pathology Images

Metastatic breast cancer is one of the attributed leading causes of women deaths worldwide. Accurate diagnosis to the spread of breast cancer to axillary lymph nodes (ALNs) is done by breast pathologist, utilizing the microscope to inspect and then providing the biopsy report. Because such a diagnosis process requires special expertise, there is a need for artificial intelligence-based tools to assist breast pathologists to automatically detect breast cancer metastases. This study aims to detect breast cancer metastasized to ALN with end-to-end deep learning (DL). Also, we utilize several DL architectures, including DenseNet121, ResNet50, VGG16, Xception as well as a customized lightweight convolutional neural network. We evaluate the DL models on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti GPU using 114 processed microscopic images pertaining to ALN metastases in breast cancer patients. Compared to all DL models employed in this study, experimental results show that DenseNet121 generates the highest performance results (64-68%) based on AUC and accuracy.