Comparative Bladder Cancer Tissues Prediction Using Vision Transformer

Abstract

Bladder cancer, often asymptomatic in the early stages, is a type of cancer where early detection is crucial. Herein, endoscopic images are meticulously evaluated by experts, and sometimes even by different disciplines, to identify tissue types. It is believed that the time spent by experts can be utilized for patient treatment with the creation of a computer-aided decision support system. For this purpose, in this study, it is evaluated that the performances of three models proposed using the bladder tissue dataset. The first model is a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based deep learning (DL) network, and the second is a model named hybrid cnn-machine learning (ML) or DL + ML, which involves classifying deep features obtained from a CNN-based network with ML. The last one, and the one that achieved the best performance metrics, is a vision transformer (ViT) architecture. Furthermore, a graphical user interface (GUI) is provided for an accessible decision support system. As a result, accuracy and F1 score values for DL, DL + ML, and ViT models are 0.9086-0.8971-0.9257 and 0.8884-0.8496-0.8931, respectively.