Artificial neural network based screening of cervical cancer using a hierarchical modular neural network architecture (HMNNA) and novel benchmark uterine cervix cancer database

The work reported in this paper presents a novel hierarchical modular neural network architecture (HMNNA) for automated screening of cervical cancer. HMNNA consists of three neural networks trained specifically on different areas of problem space under consideration, and the trained networks are then arranged in a tree structure forming hierarchical modular neural network architecture. The three specialized neural networks are trained by Levenberg-Maarquardt neural network algorithm. As compared to the standard back propagation algorithm, Levenberg-Maarquardt is fast and stable for convergence with only one drawback, i.e., storage requirement for estimated Hessian Matrix. For training and testing of HMNNA, a huge primary database is created which contains 8091 cervical cell images pertaining to 200 clinical cases collected from two health care institutions of northern India. The raw cases of cervical cancer in the form of Pap smear slides were photographed under a multi-headed digital microscope. Individual cells were manually cropped off from these slide images which were then passed through a feature extraction module for morphological profiling. Each cell was calibrated on the basis of 40 features from both cytoplasm and nucleus. After profiling, these cells were vigilantly assigned cell classes as per the latest 2001-Bethesda system of cervical cancer cell classification, by trained cytotechnicians and histopathologists. HMNNA is also trained and tested on the Herlev Benchmark dataset created by the Denmark University, which consists of 1417 cervical cancer cells. Both the datasets have seven classes of diagnosis, i.e., superficial squamous, intermediate squamous, columnar, mild dysplasia, moderate dysplasia, severe dysplasia, and carcinoma in situ, corresponding to the level of abnormality in cervical cells. These datasets are available in public domain at http://digitalpapsmeardb.in/ and http://mde-lab.aegean.gr/index.php/downloads. The screening potential of the HMNNA is compared with 25 well-known machine learning algorithms available in MatlabR2016 (Machine learning and statistics toolbox 10.2) and monolithic neural network algorithms available in Matlab neural network pattern recognition toolbox. The HMNNA outperformed in all the 25 algorithms for both the datasets. For the Novel Benchmark database, it produced a classification accuracy of 95.32% with an F-value of 0.949310 and classification accuracy of 88.41% with an F-value of 0.89145 for the Herlev dataset. The screening potential of HMNNA was also evaluated and compared with the other diagnostic systems available in the recently published literature and was found to be performing much better than the counterparts on multiple parameters of performance evaluation.