An Automatic Mass Screening System for Cervical Cancer Detection Based on Convolutional Neural Network

Cervical cancer is the fourth most common type of cancer and is also a leading cause of mortality among women across the world. Various types of screening tests are used for its diagnosis, but the most popular one is the Papanicolaou smear test, in which cell cytology is carried out. It is a reliable tool for early identification of cervical cancer, but there is always a chance of misdiagnosis because of possible errors in human observations. In this paper, an auto-assisted cervical cancer screening system is proposed that uses a convolutional neural network trained on Cervical Cells database. The training of the network is accomplished through transfer learning, whereby initializing weights are obtained from the training on ImageNet dataset. After fine-tuning the network on the Cervical Cells database, the feature vector is extracted from the last fully connected layer of convolutional neural network. For final classification/screening of the cell samples, three different classifiers are proposed including Softmax regression (SR), Support vector machine (SVM), and GentleBoost ensemble of decision trees (GEDT). The performance of the proposed screening system is evaluated for two different testing protocols, namely, 2-class problem and 7-class problem, on the Herlev database. Classification accuracies of SR, SVM, and GEDT for the 2-class problem are found to be 98.8%, 99.5%, and 99.6%, respectively, while for the 7-class problem, they are 97.21%, 98.12%, and 98.85%, respectively. These results show that the proposed system provides better performance than its previous counterparts under various testing conditions.