Hybrid Techniques for Diagnosis with WSIs for Early Detection of Cervical Cancer Based on Fusion Features

Abstract

Cervical cancer is a global health problem that threatens the lives of women. Liquid-based cytology (LBC) is one of the most used techniques for diagnosing cervical cancer; converting from vitreous slides to whole-slide images (WSIs) allows images to be evaluated by artificial intelligence techniques. Because of the lack of cytologists and cytology devices, it is major to promote automated systems that receive and diagnose huge amounts of images quickly and accurately, which are useful in hospitals and clinical laboratories. This study aims to extract features in a hybrid method to obtain representative features to achieve promising results. Three proposed approaches have been applied with different methods and materials as follows: The first approach is a hybrid method called VGG-16 with SVM and GoogLeNet with SVM. The second approach is to classify the cervical abnormal cell images by ANN classifier with hybrid features extracted by the VGG-16 and GoogLeNet. A third approach is to classify the images of abnormal cervical cells by an ANN classifier with features extracted by the VGG-16 and GoogLeNet and combine them with hand-crafted features, which are extracted using Fuzzy Color Histogram (FCH), Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) algorithms. Based on the mixed features of CNN with features of FCH, GLCM, and LBP (hand-crafted), the ANN classifier reached the best results for diagnosing abnormal cells of the cervix. The ANN network achieved with the hybrid features of VGG-16 and hand-crafted an accuracy of 99.4%, specificity of 100%, sensitivity of 99.35%, AUC of 99.89% and precision of 99.42%.