Fuzzy Clustering of Histopathological Images Using Deep Learning Embeddings

Metric learning is a machine learning approach that aims to learn a new distance metric by increas- ing (reducing) the similarity of examples belonging to the same (different) classes. The output of these approaches are embeddings, where the input data are mapped to improve a crisp or fuzzy classifica- tion process. The deep metric learning approaches regard metric learning, implemented by using deep neural networks. Such models have the advantage to discover very representative nonlinear embed- dings. In this work, we propose a triplet network deep metric learning approach, based on ResNet50, to find a representative embedding for the unsupervised fuzzy classification of benign and malignant histopathological images of breast cancer tissues. Experiments computed on the BreakHis benchmark dataset, using Fuzzy C-Means Clustering, show the benefit of using very low dimensional embeddings found by the deep metric learning approach.