Multi-path residual attention network for cancer diagnosis robust to a small number of training data of microscopic hyperspectral pathological images

Duct cancer is a malignant disease with higher mortality rates in males than in females, emphasizing the need for early diagnosis to improve treatment outcomes. Although various imaging modalities such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography scan (CT-scan) have been used for pathological analysis, hyperspectral imaging stands out as a promising approach, especially when combined with deep learning techniques. Hyperspectral imaging provides detailed information on tissue composition and biochemical properties, enabling better distinction between cancerous and healthy tissues. Although previous research based on hyperspectral imaging shows high accuracy, no previous research has used a small amount of training data, despite this being the usual case in medical image applications. Therefore, we propose a multi-path residual attention network (MRA-Net) with chunked residual channel attention (CRCA), which is a novel deep learning model specifically designed to address the challenges posed by limited training data, with a particular focus on using hyperspectral images. By leveraging the unique spectral information provided by hyperspectral imaging, MRA-Net extracts distinctive features, enhancing its ability to differentiate between cancerous and healthy tissues. We conducted the training and validation of our model using a publicly accessible dataset, resulting in an accuracy of 84.31% and a weighted harmonic mean of precision and recall (F1 score) of 84.29%, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods.