A system for detection of cervical precancerous in field emission scanning electron microscope images using texture features

Abstract

This study develops a novel cervical precancerous detection system by using texture analysis of field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) images. The processing scheme adopted in the proposed system focused on two steps. The first step was to enhance cervical cell FE-SEM images in order to show the precancerous characterization indicator. A problem arises from the question of how to extract features which characterize cervical precancerous cells. For the first step, a preprocessing technique called intensity transformation and morphological operation (ITMO) algorithm used to enhance the quality of images was proposed. The algorithm consisted of contrast stretching and morphological opening operations. The second step was to characterize the cervical cells to three classes, namely normal, low grade intra-epithelial squamous lesion (LSIL), and high grade intra-epithelial squamous lesion (HSIL). To differentiate between normal and precancerous cells of the cervical cell FE-SEM images, human papillomavirus (HPV) contained in the surface of cells were used as indicators. In this paper, we investigated the use of texture as a tool in determining precancerous cell images based on the observation that cell images have a distinct visual texture. Gray level co-occurrences matrix (GLCM) technique was used to extract the texture features. To confirm the system’s performance, the system was tested using 150 cervical cell FE-SEM images. The results showed that the accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of the proposed system are 95.7%, 95.7% and 95.8%, respectively.