Triplet-Attention Residual Network for Breast Cancer Histopathology Image Classification

Recently, breast cancer histopathology image classification using convolutional neural networks has achieved more and more attentions with the great progress. To capture more discriminant deep features for the classification, this paper proposes a novel triplet-attention residual network, i.e., TAResNet, to distinguish the breast cancer histopathology image. TAResNet employs the representative ResNet18 model to extract deep features of histopathology images, followed by a triplet-attention module to further boost the discriminability of deep features through expanding feature diversity and enhancing inter-dimensional dependency. Extensive experiments carried out on the public BreakHis dataset well evaluate the effectiveness the given TAResNet model. More specifically, TAResNet achieves its optimal classification accuracy of 98.34% and 98.77% at the image level and patient level, respectively.