Performance and Interpretability of Convolutional, Transformer, and Hybrid Deep Learning Models in Colorectal Histology Classification

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23744v1
• Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:56:42 GMT
• Title: Performance and Interpretability of Convolutional, Transformer, and Hybrid Deep Learning Models in Colorectal Histology Classification
• Abstract summary: This study evaluated twelve ImageNet-pretrained CNN, transformer, and hybrid architectures using the Kather colorectal histopathology dataset.<n> EVA-02 achieved the highest overall performance (97.1% accuracy, 97.0% F1-score), closely followed by ViT-B/16.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Deep learning has become an important tool in computational pathology, enabling automated analysis of histopathological images. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have traditionally dominated this field, transformer-based and hybrid architectures have recently demonstrated promising performance. However, comprehensive comparisons of these approaches for colorectal histopathology remain limited. This study evaluated twelve ImageNet-pretrained CNN, transformer, and hybrid architectures using the Kather colorectal histopathology dataset containing 5,000 image tiles from eight tissue classes. All models were trained using a standardized transfer-learning and fine-tuning protocol and assessed using multiple performance metrics, including accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, ROC-AUC, Cohen's kappa, and Matthews correlation coefficient. All evaluated models achieved high classification performance, with accuracies ranging from 93.2% to 97.1%. EVA-02 achieved the highest overall performance (97.1% accuracy, 97.0% F1-score), closely followed by ViT-B/16. Among CNNs, ResNet34 and ConvNeXt-Tiny demonstrated highly competitive performance, achieving accuracies of 96.4% and 96.3%, respectively. Transformer architectures generally produced the strongest results across evaluation metrics, although the performance gap between the best transformer and CNN models was relatively small. Per-class analysis showed consistently strong classification performance across all tissue categories, with Complex Stroma representing the most challenging class. Overall, transformer-based architectures achieved the highest predictive performance, whereas modern CNNs provided a favorable balance between accuracy and model complexity. These findings provide a comprehensive benchmark of major deep learning paradigms for colorectal histopathology classification.

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