Advanced Deep Learning Fusion Model for Early Multi-Classification of Lung and Colon Cancer Using Histopathological Images

Background: In recent years, the healthcare field has experienced significant advancements. New diagnostic techniques, treatments, and insights into the causes of various diseases have emerged. Despite these progressions, cancer remains a major concern. It is a widespread illness affecting individuals of all ages and leads to one out of every six deaths. Lung and colon cancer alone account for nearly two million fatalities. Though it is rare for lung and colon cancers to co-occur, the spread of cancer cells between these two areas—known as metastasis—is notably high. Early detection of cancer greatly increases survival rates. Currently, histopathological image (HI) diagnosis and appropriate treatment are key methods for reducing cancer mortality and enhancing survival rates. Digital image processing (DIP) and deep learning (DL) algorithms can be employed to analyze the HIs of five different types of lung and colon tissues. Methods: Therefore, this paper proposes a refined DL model that integrates feature fusion for the multi-classification of lung and colon cancers. The proposed model incorporates three DL architectures: ResNet-101V2, NASNetMobile, and EfficientNet-B0. Each model has limitations concerning variations in the shape and texture of input images. To address this, the proposed model utilizes a concatenate layer to merge the pre-trained individual feature vectors from ResNet-101V2, NASNetMobile, and EfficientNet-B0 into a single feature vector, which is then fine-tuned. As a result, the proposed DL model achieves high success in multi-classification by leveraging the strengths of all three models to enhance overall accuracy. This model aims to assist pathologists in the early detection of lung and colon cancer with reduced effort, time, and cost. The proposed DL model was evaluated using the LC25000 dataset, which contains colon and lung HIs. The dataset was pre-processed using resizing and normalization techniques. Results: The model was tested and compared with recent DL models, achieving impressive results: 99.8% for precision, 99.8% for recall, 99.8% for F1-score, 99.96% for specificity, and 99.94% for accuracy. Conclusions: Thus, the proposed DL model demonstrates exceptional performance across all classification categories.