Breast cancer has a high mortality rate among cancers. If the type of breast tumor can be correctly diagnosed at an early stage, the survival rate of the patients will be greatly improved. Considering the actual clinical needs, the classification model of breast pathology images needs to have the ability to make a correct classification, even in facing image data with different characteristics. The existing convolutional neural network (CNN)-based models for the classification of breast tumor pathology images lack the requisite generalization capability to maintain high accuracy when confronted with pathology images of varied characteristics. Consequently, this study introduces a new classification model, STMLAN (Single-Task Meta Learning with Auxiliary Network), which integrates Meta Learning and an auxiliary network. Single-Task Meta Learning was proposed to endow the model with generalization ability, and the auxiliary network was used to enhance the feature characteristics of breast pathology images. The experimental results demonstrate that the STMLAN model proposed in this study improves accuracy by at least 1.85% in challenging multi-classification tasks compared to the existing methods. Furthermore, the Silhouette Score corresponding to the features learned by the model has increased by 31.85%, reflecting that the proposed model can learn more discriminative features, and the generalization ability of the overall model is also improved.
Keywords: auxiliary network; image classification; medical images; single-task meta learning.