Supervised Contrastive Vision Transformer for Breast Histopathological Image Classification

TL;DR

This paper introduces SupCon-ViT, a novel supervised contrastive vision transformer that significantly improves breast cancer histopathology classification accuracy and robustness, especially with limited labeled data.

Contribution

The paper presents a new supervised contrastive vision transformer model that combines transfer learning and contrastive learning for better IDC classification.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art F1-score of 0.8188 on benchmark dataset.

Outperforms existing methods in accuracy and generalization.

Remains effective with minimal labeled data.

Abstract

Invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) is the most prevalent form of breast cancer. Breast tissue histopathological examination is critical in diagnosing and classifying breast cancer. Although existing methods have shown promising results, there is still room for improvement in the classification accuracy and generalization of IDC using histopathology images. We present a novel approach, Supervised Contrastive Vision Transformer (SupCon-ViT), for improving the classification of invasive ductal carcinoma in terms of accuracy and generalization by leveraging the inherent strengths and advantages of both transfer learning, i.e., pre-trained vision transformer, and supervised contrastive learning. Our results on a benchmark breast cancer dataset demonstrate that SupCon-Vit achieves state-of-the-art performance in IDC classification, with an F1-score of 0.8188, precision of 0.7692, and specificity of 0.8971, outperforming existing methods. In addition, the proposed model demonstrates resilience in scenarios with minimal labeled data, making it highly efficient in real-world clinical settings where labelled data is limited. Our findings suggest that supervised contrastive learning in conjunction with pre-trained vision transformers appears to be a viable strategy for an accurate classification of IDC, thus paving the way for a more efficient and reliable diagnosis of breast cancer through histopathological image analysis.