EBHI: A new Enteroscope Biopsy Histopathological H&E Image Dataset for image classification evaluation

Background and purpose: Colorectal cancer has become the third most common cancer worldwide, ac-counting for approximately 10% of cancer patients. Early detection of the disease is important for the treatment of colorectal cancer patients. Histopathological examination is the gold standard for screening colorectal cancer. However, the current lack of histopathological image datasets of colorectal cancer, especially enteroscope biopsies, hinders the accurate evaluation of computer-aided diagnosis techniques. Therefore, a multi-category colorectal cancer dataset is needed to test various medical image classification methods to find high classification accuracy and strong robustness.Methods: A new publicly available Enteroscope Biopsy Histopathological H&E Image Dataset (EBHI) is published in this paper. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the EBHI dataset, we have utilized several machine learning, convolutional neural networks and novel transformer-based classifiers for experimentation and evaluation, using an image with a magnification of 200x.Results: Experimental results show that the deep learning method performs well on the EBHI dataset. Classical machine learning methods achieve maximum accuracy of 76.02% and deep learning method achieves a maximum accuracy of 95.37%.Conclusion: To the best of our knowledge, EBHI is the first publicly available colorectal histopathology enteroscope biopsy dataset with four magnifications and five types of images of tumor differentiation stages, totaling 5532 images. We believe that EBHI could attract researchers to explore new classification algorithms for the automated diagnosis of colorectal cancer, which could help physicians and patients in clinical settings.