Back

Attention-Guided CNN Ensemble for Binary Classification of High-Grade and Low-Grade Serous Ovarian Carcinoma from Histopathological WSI Patches

rani, a.; mishra, s.

2026-04-22 oncology
10.64898/2026.04.21.26351441 medRxiv
Show abstract

Accurate histopathological differentiation between High-Grade Serous Carcinoma (HGSC) and Low-Grade Serous Carcinoma (LGSC) remains a critical yet challenging aspect of ovarian cancer diagnosis due to their similar morphology and different clinical outcomes. This study presents a deep learning framework that uses custom attention mechanisms, including the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) blocks, and a Differential Attention module within five CNN architectures for automated binary classification of ovarian cancer subtypes from H&E WSI patches. Although individual models achieved higher accuracy, the ensemble stacking framework with a shallow MLP meta-learner delivered the best overall performance, with a ROC-AUC of 0.9211, an accuracy of 0.85, and F1-scores of 0.84 and 0.85 across both subtypes. These findings demonstrate that attention-guided feature recalibration combined with ensemble stacking provides robust and clinically interpretable discrimination of ovarian carcinoma subtypes.

Matching journals

The top 9 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.