Ensembling handcrafted features with deep features: an analytical study for classification of routine colon cancer histopathological nuclei images

Abstract

The use of Deep Learning (DL) based methods in medical histopathology images have been one of the most sought after solutions to classify, segment, and detect diseased biopsy samples. However, given the complex nature of medical datasets due to the presence of intra-class variability and heterogeneity, the use of complex DL models might not give the optimal performance up to the level which is suitable for assisting pathologists. Therefore, ensemble DL methods with the scope of including domain agnostic handcrafted Features (HC-F) inspired this work. We have, through experiments, tried to highlight that a single DL network (domain-specific or state of the art pre-trained models) cannot be directly used as the base model without proper analysis with the relevant dataset. We have used F1-measure, Precision, Recall, AUC, and Cross-Entropy Loss to analyse the performance of our approaches. We observed from the results that the DL features ensemble bring a marked improvement in the overall performance of the model, whereas, domain agnostic HC-F remains dormant on the performance of the DL models.