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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23744 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23744/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [CoAtNet: Marrying Convolution and Attention for All Data Sizes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04803/) (2021)
- [Deep neural network models for computational histopathology: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12378/) (2019)
- [Deep-Learning for Classification of Colorectal Polyps on Whole-Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01550/) (2017)
- [EBHI-Seg: A Novel Enteroscope Biopsy Histopathological Haematoxylin and Eosin Image Dataset for Image Segmentation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00532/) (2022)
- [EBHI:A New Enteroscope Biopsy Histopathological H&E Image Dataset for Image Classification Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08552/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.