A method for classifying medical images using transfer learning: A pilot study on histopathology of breast cancer

Abstract

The advance of deep learning has made huge changes in computer vision and produced various off-the-shelf trained models. Particularly, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been widely used to build image classification model which allow researchers transfer the pre-trained learning model for other classifications. We propose a transfer learning method to detect breast cancer using histopathology images based on Google's Inception v3 model which were initially trained for the classification of non-medical images. The pilot study shows the feasibility of transfer learning in the detection of breast cancer with AUC of 0.93.