Cervical Cancer Diagnostics Healthcare System Using Hybrid Object Detection Adversarial Networks

IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2022 Apr;26(4):1464-1471. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2021.3094311. Epub 2022 Apr 14.

Abstract

Cervical cancer is one of the common cancers among women and it causes significant mortality in many developing countries. Diagnosis of cervical lesions is done using pap smear test or visual inspection using acetic acid (staining). Digital colposcopy, an inexpensive methodology, provides painless and efficient screening results. Therefore, automating cervical cancer screening using colposcopy images will be highly useful in saving many lives. Nowadays, many automation techniques using computer vision and machine learning in cervical screening gained attention, paving the way for diagnosing cervical cancer. However, most of the methods rely entirely on the annotation of cervical spotting and segmentation. This paper aims to introduce the Faster Small-Object Detection Neural Networks (FSOD-GAN) to address the cervical screening and diagnosis of cervical cancer and the type of cancer using digital colposcopy images. The proposed approach automatically detects the cervical spot using Faster Region-Based Convolutional Neural Network (FR-CNN) and performs the hierarchical multiclass classification of three types of cervical cancer lesions. Experimentation was done with colposcopy data collected from available open sources consisting of 1,993 patients with three cervical categories, and the proposed approach shows 99% accuracy in diagnosing the stages of cervical cancer.

MeSH terms

  • Cervix Uteri / diagnostic imaging
  • Colposcopy
  • Delivery of Health Care
  • Early Detection of Cancer / methods
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Papanicolaou Test
  • Pregnancy
  • Sensitivity and Specificity
  • Uterine Cervical Neoplasms* / diagnostic imaging
  • Uterine Cervical Neoplasms* / pathology
  • Vaginal Smears