Automated Esophageal Tumor Detection Using Deep Learning

Esophageal cancer remains one of the most lethal malignancies worldwide, where early detection is essential for improving survival outcomes. Traditional diagnostic methods such as endoscopy and histopathology are time-consuming, resource-intensive, and subject to human variability. This study presents a deep learning-based end-to-end diagnostic system for esophageal cancer detection using image classification. The proposed model integrates a hybrid architecture combining Swin Transformer and ResNet-50, capturing both global contextual information and fine-grained local features to enhance classification accuracy. Due to the absence of pixel-level annotated segmentation masks, a Grad-CAM-based visualization technique is employed to localize cancer-affected regions, providing interpretability and visual support for clinical decisions. A confidence-based grading module is included to estimate cancer severity levels—Low, Medium, or High—using model prediction probabilities, thereby compensating for the lack of explicitly labeled grading data. The model is trained and optimized under low-memory constraints, ensuring efficient deployment in real-world environments, including low-resource clinical settings. It is saved in a portable PyTorch .pth format, enabling consistent inference across platforms. Additionally, a web interface built with Flask allows users to upload endoscopic images and receive real-time predictions, visual heatmaps, and grading feedback. Experimental results on a dataset of cancerous and non-cancerous esophageal images demonstrate high classification accuracy and reliable visual explanations, validating the system's effectiveness. This work highlights the potential of artificial intelligence in advancing diagnostic tools for esophageal cancer and offers a practical solution for resource-limited healthcare settings.