Comparison of Classifier Configurations for the Classification of Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia Using Acetic Acid Test Images

Abstract

Cervical cancer represents a major cause of death for women. Automatic classification of cervical images from acetic acid test could serve as a promising screening tool for cervical cancer. Despite an increasing volume of studies on automatic classification of cervical images, reported methods varied markedly in terms of features and classifiers used, and therefore the performance. The classification performance using different configurations of the classifier has not been well characterized. The objective of this study was to evaluate several frequently used features and classifiers in acetic-acid cervical image based cervical intraepithelial neoplasia classification. Seven typically used color or texture-based features and four frequently used classifiers (Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, Back-Propagation Neural Network and K-Nearest Neighbors) were included in the comparison based on a balanced large sample size including 175 CIN negative and 175 CIN positive patients. The results showed that the Support Vector Machine demonstrated the best classification accuracy when a subset of features was used. The finding of this study may provide useful reference values to the development of an automatic cervical cancer screening tool.