Classification of Cervical Cancer Using an Autoencoder and Cascaded Multilayer Perceptron

Abstract

Cervical cancer is the most frequent and potent form of cancer in women. The complications caused by it can be avoided if it is detected and treated promptly. In oncology, artificial intelligence has improved the prediction accuracy in the preliminary stages of cervical cancer. In this work, a novel machine learning-based approach is introduced to predict and categorize the healthy and anomalous cervical cells. Initially, an adaptive median filter is utilized to eliminate the noise artefacts in the pap smears from the Herlev dataset. The auto-encoder (AE) is employed to extract the features and reduce the dimension of features to progress the training process. Consequently, a cascaded multilayer perceptron (c-MLP) is employed for the classification of the normal and abnormal cervical cells. The c-MLP was trained using the Bayesian Regulation algorithm to generate the best classification accuracy of 97.63%. As a result, the classification using the c-MLP is more accurate and effective for classifying healthy and malignant cervical cells than the classic ML classifiers. The proposed ML-based framework progresses the overall accuracy range by 3.61%, 4.40%, 5.07%, and 4.66% better than SVM, XGB, RF, and DT, respectively.

Keywords:

• Auto-encoder (AE)
• Adaptive median filter
• Cascaded multilayer perceptron (c-MLP)
• Cervical cancer
• Pap smear images

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors thank the supervisor for her direction and continuous support during this study.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

K.R. Akhila

K R Akhila was born in Marthandam, Tamilnadu in 1985. She received the BE degree in computer science and engineering in 2007 and the MTech in computer and information technology in 2011. She is currently doing her PhD at Anna University. Her major research interests are image processing and machine learning. Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

N. Muthukumaran

N Muthukumaran was born in Kaniyakumari, Tamilnadu, India, in 1984. He received the BE degree in electronics and communication engineering, ME degree in applied electronics and the PhD degree in information and communication engineering from Anna University, Chennai, India in 2007, 2010 and 2015 respectively. He is currently working as a professor, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering in Francis Xavier Engineering College, affiliated to Anna University Chennai, Tirunelveli, Tamilnadu, India. His major research interests are in the field of digital image/signal processing, multimedia image/video processing/compression, digital and analog very large scale integration circuit design. Since 2006, he published more than 73 international journals like Springer, IEEE, Elsevier and 88 national/international conferences papers. He has published 13 international books, which are related to engineering community. He actively participated and organized more than 102 research related events like national and international workshop, faculty development programs, seminars, symposia, conferences and short term courses. He is life time member of more than 19 societies like IEEE, ISI,WCECS, UACEE, etc. Email: [email protected]

A. Ahilan

A Ahilan Appathurai received PhD from Anna University, India, and working as an associate professor in the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering at PSN College of Engineering and Technology, India. His area of interest includes FPGA prototyping, computer vision, the internet of things, cloud computing in medical, biometrics, and automation applications. Served as guest editor in several journals of Elsevier, Benthom, IGI publishers. Also, contributed original research articles in IEEE Transactions, SCI, SCIE, and Scopus indexed peer-review journals. He presented various international conference events like ASQED (Malaysia), ESREF (France). He is serving as a reviewer in IEEE industrial informatics, IEEE Access, Measurement, Multimedia Tools & Applications, Computer Networks, Medical Systems, Computer & Electrical Engineering, Neural Computing and Applications, Cluster Computing, IET Image Processing, and so on. He has IEEE and ISTE membership. He has worked as a research consultant at TCS, Bangalore, where he guided many computer vision projects and bluetooth low energy projects, hands on programming in MATLAB, verilog and python at various technical institutions around India. Email: [email protected]