Classification of cervical cancer using Dense CapsNet with Seg-UNet and denoising autoencoders

Cervical cancer is one of the deadly diseases that affects women, which requires periodic examinations to identify and treat any cancerous tumors at a preliminary stage. The most prevalent examination tool for cervical cancer prompt identification is the cervical smear (Pap smear) testing; however, due to human negligence, this examination method has an elevated probability of negative findings. Cervical cancer classification using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) has been extensively studied to enhance the conventional diagnostic process. Robust classification results were achieved through the pre-segmented imagery in most current investigations. Conversely, cellular grouping makes reliable cervical cellular segmentation difficult. Additionally, the deep learning methods used in the existing works perform poorly on a multiclass classification when the data distribution is skewed, which is common in the cervical cancer dataset. To mitigate these restrictions in cervical cancer research, this proposed work uses a combination of four different deep-learning methods in various phases of this research. The proposed work is segregated into five phases: pre-processing, data augmentation, segmentation, feature extraction, and classification. Contrast maximization is performed in the pre-processing phase, and the images are augmented using Multi-modal Generative Adversarial Networks (m-GAN) in the second phase. In the third phase, cervical cancer images are segmented using the Seg-UNet model, which is forwarded to the feature extraction phase that employs denoising autoencoders. Finally, the classification is implemented using the Dense CapsNet model and applied to the SIPaKMeD dataset to categorize between normal, abnormal, and benign classes. The proposed system achieves an accuracy of 99.65%, which is higher than the other works in the literature.