Deep Learning for Histopathological Image Analysis: A Convolutional Neural Network Approach to Colon Cancer Classification

Colon cancer is a type of cancer that attacks the last part of the human digestive tract. Factors such as an unhealthy diet, low fiber consumption, and high animal protein and fat intake can increase the risk of developing this disease. Diagnosis of colon cancer requires sophisticated diagnostic procedures such as CT scan, MRI, PET scan, ultrasound, or biopsy, which are often time-consuming and require particular expertise. This study aims to classify colon cancer based on histopathological images using a dataset of 10,000 images. This data is divided into 7,950 images for training, 2,000 for testing, and 50 for validation, aiming to achieve effective generalization. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) method was applied in this research with a relatively shallow architecture consisting of 4 convolution layers, 2 fully connected layers, and 1 output layer. Research results were evaluated by looking at the accuracy value of 99.55%, precision value of 99.49%, recall of 99.59%, prediction experiments on several images, and loss and accuracy graphs to detect signs of overfitting. However, this research has limitations in determining hyperparameters and layer depth, which was only tested from 1 to 5 convolution layers. Therefore, there are still opportunities for further development, such as applying unique feature extraction before the classification process.