ProsGradNet: An effective and structured CNN approach for prostate cancer grading from histopathology images

Abstract

Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the most prevalent and potentially fatal malignancies affecting men globally. The incidence of prostate cancer is expected to double by 2040, posing significant health challenges. This anticipated increase underscores the urgent need for early and precise diagnosis to facilitate effective treatment and management. Histopathological analysis using Gleason grading system plays a pivotal role in clinical decision making by classifying cancer subtypes based on their cellular characteristics. This paper proposes a novel deep CNN model named as Prostate Grading Network (ProsGradNet), for the automatic grading of PCa from histopathological images. Central to the approach is the novel Context Guided Shared Channel Residual (CGSCR) block, that introduces structured methods for channel splitting and clustering, by varying group sizes. By grouping channels into 2, 4, and 8, it prioritizes deeper layer features, enhancing local semantic content and abstract feature representation. This methodological advancement significantly boosts classification accuracy, achieving an impressive 92.88% on Prostate Gleason dataset, outperforming other CNN models. To demonstrate the generalizability of ProsGradNet over different datasets, experiments are performed on Kasturba Medical College (KMC) Kidney dataset as well. The results further confirm the superiority of the proposed ProsGradNet model, with a classification accuracy of 92.68% on the KMC Kidney dataset. This demonstrates the model's potential to be applied effectively across various histopathological datasets, making it a valuable tool to fight against cancer. © 2025 Elsevier Ltd