A comprehensive study on the multi-class cervical cancer diagnostic prediction on pap smear images using a fusion-based decision from ensemble deep convolutional neural network

The diagnosis of cervical dysplasia, carcinoma in situ and confirmed carcinoma cases is more easily perceived by commercially available and current research-based decision support systems when the scenario of pathologists to patient ratio is small. The treatment modalities for such diagnosis rely exclusively on precise identification of dysplasia stages as followed by The Bethesda System. The classification based on The Bethesda System is a multiclass problem, which is highly relevant and vital. Reliance on image interpretation, when done manually, introduces inter-observer variability and makes the microscope observation tedious and time-consuming. Taking this into account, a computer-assisted screening system built on deep learning can significantly assist pathologists to screen with correct predictions at a faster rate. The current study explores six different deep convolutional neural networks- Alexnet, Vggnet (vgg-16 and vgg-19), Resnet (resnet-50 and resnet-101) and Googlenet architectures for mull-class (four-class) diagnosis of cervical pre-cancerous as well as cancer lesions and incorporates their relative assessment. The study highlights the addition of an ensemble classifier with three of the best deep learning models for yielding a high accuracy mull-class classification. All six deep models including ensemble classifier were trained and validated on a hospital-based pap smear dataset collected through both conventional and liquid-based cytology methods along with the benchmark Herlev dataset.