Tahreem ZaraCIIT/SP23-RCS-028/LHRDr. Zulfiqar HabibLHR TP 97062026-01-062025https://repository.cuilahore.edu.pk/handle/123456789/247Breast cancer remains one of the most frequently diagnosed cancers among women globally, with histopathology analysis serving as the gold standard for diagnosis. But manual examination of histopathology slides takes a long time, is prone to making mistakes, and often has differences between observers, especially in complicated cases. To overcome these constraints, this study introduces a lightweight and deployable deep learning framework designed to automate breast cancer detection utilizing histopathology images from the BRACS dataset. The proposed framework utilizes the DenseNet169 model pre-trained on ImageNet; we fine-tuned the last 30 layers after testing different depths. We resized the input images to 1024×1024 to preserve important morphological details, and we employed simple augmentations, such as rotation and flipping, during training. Additionally, a semi-automated segmentation and annotation strategy was developed using k-means clustering based on RGB color and shape features, generating binary masks that were further validated by a histopathologist. Both classification and segmentation models were implemented in Keras on a CPU-based environment with 32 GB RAM. We evaluated our models using scikit-learn. The classification achieved 79% accuracy on the 3-class test set and 90% accuracy on the binary test set (normal vs. invasive carcinoma), demonstrating competitive results compared to state-of-the-art models. The evaluation metrics used for both models were precision, recall, and F1-score; classification performance was further assessed using accuracy, and segmentation performance was evaluated using the Dice coefficient. Our classification model (DenseNet169 with partial fine-tuning) has approximately 4 million trainable parameters, while the segmentation model (U-Net with ResNet34 encoder) consists of around 25 million parameters—both models being compact enough for deployment on standard desktop CPUs. The segmentation masks were generated using a novel semi-automated pipeline that balances visual coherence (shape and structure) with RGB clustering, allowing more precise annotation than conventional thresholding or fully automated tools. These findings highlight that a selectively fine-tuned CNN can deliver reliable diagnostic assistance, even in resource- constrained environments.enDepartment of Computer ScienceSP23Computer ScienceHistopathology ImagesCNNhistopathologyDr. Zulfiqar HabibThesis