Automated Cell Nuclei Segmentation on Cervical Smear Images Using Structure Analysis

Abstract

Cervical cancer is a common cancer that affects women around the world, and it is also the most common cancer in the developing countries. The cancer burden has increased due to several factors, such as population growth and ageing. In the early century, the systematization of cervical cancer cells takes some time to process manually, and the result that comes out is also inaccurate. This article presents a new nucleus segmentation on pap smear cell images based on structured analysis or morphological approach. Morphology is a broad set of image processing operations that process images based on shape, size and structure. This operation applies a structural element of the image to create an output image of the same size. The most basic of these operations are dilation and erosion. The results of the numerical analysis indicate that the proposed method achieved about 94.38% (sensitivity), 82.56% (specificity) and 93% (accuracy). Also, the resulting performance was compared to a few existing techniques such as Bradley Method, Nick Method and Sauvola Method. The results presented here may facilitate improvements in the detection method of the pap smear cell image to resolve the time-consuming issue and support better system performance to prevent low precision result of the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) stages. The main impact of this paper is will help the doctor to identify the patient disease based on Pap smear analysis such as cervical cancer and increase the percentages of accuracy compared to the conventional method. Successful implementation of the nucleus detection techniques on Pap smear image can become a standard technique for the diagnosis of various microbiological infections such as Malaria and Tuberculosis.