Cervical cancer detection and classification from pap smear images

In this paper, we propose a framework for detection and classification of cervical cancer from pap smear images. Early detection and accurate diagnosis of cervical cancer can reduce the death rate of cervical cancer patients. Pap smear or pap test is the most popular technique for early detection of cervical cancer. However, the manual analysis is labor intensive and time consuming process which relies on expert cytologist. Hence, it is needed to develop a computer aided diagnosis system to make the pap smear test more accurate and reliable. The objective of this paper is to present an innovative idea of applying random forest algorithm (RF) as a feature selection method using proposed bagging ensemble classifier for improving the predictive performance. The four basic steps of cervical cancer detection and classification system, image enhancement, segmentation, feature extraction and classification were used. K-means clustering combining with morphology operations obtained good segmentation for cell nuclei and cytoplasm. The most important features, shape, color and texture of nuclei and cytoplasm were applied to detect cervical cancer. To improve the accuracy of prediction results, random forest (RF) algorithm was used as a feature selection method. In classification stage, bagging ensemble classifier was applied which aggregated the results of five classifiers, linear discriminant (LD), support vector machine (SVM), weighted k-nearest neighbor (KNN), boosted trees and bagged trees. Herlev data set was used to prove the effectiveness of our proposed method. According to the experimental results, the high classification accuracy was achieved with top10 features using our proposed combined classifier. The accuracy was 97.83% in two class problem and 81.54% in seven class problem. When the results were compared with five classifiers, our proposed method was significantly better in two class and seven class problems.