Deep learning is one of the most commonly used techniques in computer-aided diagnosis systems. Their exploitation for histopathological image analysis is important because of the complex morphology of whole slide images. However, the main limitation of these methods is the restricted number of available medical images, which can lead to an overfitting problem. Many studies have suggested the use of static ensemble learning methods to address this issue. This article aims to propose a new dynamic ensemble deep learning method. First, it generates a set of models based on the transfer learning strategy from deep neural networks. Then, the relevant subset of models is selected by the particle swarm optimization algorithm and combined by voting or averaging methods. The proposed approach was tested on a histopathological dataset for colorectal cancer classification, based on seven types of CNNs. The method has achieved accurate results (94.52%) by the Resnet121 model and the voting strategy, which provides important insights into the efficiency of dynamic ensembling in deep learning.
Deep learning methods are characterized by their capacity to learn data representation compared to the traditional machine learning algorithms. However, these methods are prone to overfitting on small volumes of data. The objective of this research is to overcome this limitation by improving the generalization in the proposed deep learning framework based on various techniques: data augmentation, small models, optimizer selection, and ensemble learning. For ensembling, the authors used selected models from different checkpoints and both voting and unweighted average methods for combination. The experimental study on the lymphomas histopathological dataset highlights the efficiency of the MobileNet2 network combined with the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimizer in terms of generalization. The best results have been achieved by the combination of the best three checkpoint models (98.67% of accuracy). These findings provide important insights into the efficiency of the checkpoint ensemble learning method for histopathological image classification.
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