As one of the most common female cancers, cervical cancer often develops years after a prolonged and reversible pre-cancerous stage. Traditional classification algorithms used for detection of cervical cancer often require cell segmentation and feature extraction techniques, while convolutional neural network (CNN) models demand a large dataset to mitigate over-fitting and poor generalization problems. To this end, this study aims to develop deep learning models for automated cervical cancer detection that do not rely on segmentation methods or custom features. Due to limited data availability, transfer learning was employed with pre-trained CNN models to directly operate on Pap smear images for a seven-class classification task. Thorough evaluation and comparison of 13 pre-trained deep CNN models were performed using the publicly available Herlev dataset and the Keras package in Google Collaboratory. In terms of accuracy and performance, DenseNet-201 is the best-performing model. The pre-trained CNN models studied in this paper produced good experimental results and required little computing time.
Keywords: Cervical cancer classification; Cervical cancer detection; Convolutional neural network; Deep learning; Medical image processing; Pap smear images.
© 2023. The Author(s).