Multi-Scale Deep Learning for Colon Histopathology: A Hybrid Graph-Transformer Approach

Abstract: Colon cancer also known as Colorectal cancer, is one of the most malignant types of cancer worldwide. Early-stage detection of colon cancer is highly crucial to prevent its deterioration. This research presents a hybrid multi-scale deep learning architecture that synergizes capsule networks, graph attention mechanisms, transformer modules, and residual learning to advance colon cancer classification on the Lung and Colon Cancer Histopathological Image Dataset (LC25000) dataset. The proposed model in this paper utilizes the HG-TNet model that introduces a hybrid architecture that joins strength points in transformers and convolutional neural networks to capture multi-scale features in histopathological images. Mainly, a transformer branch extracts global contextual bonds by partitioning the image into patches by convolution-based patch embedding and then processing these patches through a transformer encoder. Analogously, a dedicated CNN branch captures fine-grained, local details through successive Incorporation these diverse features, combined with a self-supervised rotation prediction objective, produce a robust diagnostic representation that surpasses standard architectures in performance. Results show better performance not only in accuracy or loss function but also in these algorithms by utilizing capsule networks to preserve spatial orders and realize how each element individually combines and forms whole structures.