Attention Model Enhanced Network for Classification of Breast Cancer Image

Breast cancer classification remains a challenging task due to inter-class ambiguity and intra-class variability. Existing deep learning-based methods try to confront this challenge by utilizing complex nonlinear projections. However, these methods typically extract global features from entire images, neglecting the fact that the subtle detail information can be crucial in extracting discriminative features. In this study, we propose a novel method named Attention Model Enhanced Network (AMEN), which is formulated in a multi-branch fashion with pixel-wised attention model and classification submodular. Specifically, the feature learning part in AMEN can generate pixel-wised attention map, while the classification submodular are utilized to classify the samples. To focus more on subtle detail information, the sample image is enhanced by the pixel-wised attention map generated from former branch. Furthermore, boosting strategy are adopted to fuse classification results from different branches for better performance. Experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method under various scenarios.