CerviLearnNet: Advancing cervical cancer diagnosis with reinforcement learning-enhanced convolutional networks

Heliyon. 2024 Apr 24;10(9):e29913. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e29913. eCollection 2024 May 15.

Abstract

Women tend to face many problems throughout their lives; cervical cancer is one of the most dangerous diseases that they can face, and it has many negative consequences. Regular screening and treatment of precancerous lesions play a vital role in the fight against cervical cancer. It is becoming increasingly common in medical practice to predict the early stages of serious illnesses, such as heart attacks, kidney failure, and cancer, using machine learning-based techniques. To overcome these obstacles, we propose the use of auxiliary modules and a special residual block, to record contextual interactions between object classes and to support the object reference strategy. Unlike the latest state-of-the-art classification method, we create a new architecture called the Reinforcement Learning Cancer Network, "RL-CancerNet", which diagnoses cervical cancer with incredible accuracy. We trained and tested our method on two well-known publicly available datasets, SipaKMeD and Herlev, to assess it and enable comparisons with earlier methods. Cervical cancer images were labeled in this dataset; therefore, they had to be marked manually. Our study shows that, compared to previous approaches for the assignment of classifying cervical cancer as an early cellular change, the proposed approach generates a more reliable and stable image derived from images of datasets of vastly different sizes, indicating that it will be effective for other datasets.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Cervical cancer; Classification; Deep learning; Machine learning; Reinforcement learning.