PortNet: Achieving lightweight architecture and high accuracy in lung cancer cell classification.

Background: As one of the cancers with the highest incidence and mortality rates worldwide, the timeliness and accuracy of cell type diagnosis in lung cancer are crucial for patients' treatment decisions. This study aims to develop a novel deep learning model to provide efficient, accurate, and cost-effective auxiliary diagnosis for the pathological types of lung cancer cells.

Method: This paper introduces a model named PortNet, designed to significantly reduce the model's parameter size and achieve lightweight characteristics without compromising classification accuracy. We incorporated 1 × 1 convolutional blocks into the Depthwise Separable Convolution architecture to further decrease the model's parameter count. Additionally, the integration of the Squeeze-and-Excitation self-attention module enhances feature representation without substantially increasing the number of parameters, thereby maintaining high predictive performance.

Result: Our tests demonstrated that PortNet significantly reduces the total parameter count to 2,621,827, which is over a fifth smaller compared to some mainstream CNN models, marking a substantial advancement for deployment in portable devices. We also established widely-used traditional models as benchmarks to illustrate the efficacy of PortNet. In external tests, PortNet achieved an average accuracy (ACC) of 99.89 % and Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 99.27 %. During five-fold cross-validation, PortNet maintained an average ACC of 99.51 % ± 1.50 % and F1 score of 99.50 % ± 1.51 %, showcasing its lightweight capability and exceptionally high accuracy. This presents a promising opportunity for integration into hospital systems to assist physicians in diagnosis.

Conclusion: This study significantly reduces the parameter count through an innovative model structure while maintaining high accuracy and stability, demonstrating outstanding performance in lung cancer cell classification tasks. The model holds the potential to become an efficient, accurate, and cost-effective auxiliary diagnostic tool for pathological classification of lung cancer in the future.