CytoBrain: Cervical Cancer Screening System Based on Deep Learning Technology

Identification of abnormal cervical cells is a significant problem in computer-aided diagnosis of cervical cancer. In this study, we develop an artificial intelligence (AI) system, named CytoBrain, to automatically screen abnormal cervical cells to help facilitate the subsequent clinical diagnosis of the subjects. The system consists of three main modules: 1) the cervical cell segmentation module which is responsible for efficiently extracting cell images in a whole slide image (WSI); 2) the cell classification module based on a compact visual geometry group (VGG) network called CompactVGG which is the key part of the system and is used for building the cell classifier; 3) the visualized human-aided diagnosis module which can automatically diagnose a WSI based on the classification results of cells in it, and provide two visual display modes for users to review and modify. For model construction and validation, we have developed a dataset containing 198 952 cervical cell images (60 238 positive, 25 001 negative, and 113 713 junk) from samples of 2 312 adult women. Since CompactVGG is the key part of CytoBrain, we conduct comparison experiments to evaluate its time and classification performance on our developed dataset and two public datasets separately. The comparison results with VGG11, the most efficient one in the family of VGG networks, show that CompactVGG takes less time for either model training or sample testing. Compared with three sophisticated deep learning models, CompactVGG consistently achieves the best classification performance. The results illustrate that the system based on CompactVGG is efficient and effective and can support for large-scale cervical cancer screening.