HDFCN: A Robust Hybrid Deep Network Based on Feature Concatenation for Cervical Cancer Diagnosis on WSI Pap Smear Slides

Cervical cancer is a critical imperilment to a female's health due to its malignancy and fatality rate. The disease can be thoroughly cured by locating and treating the infected tissues in the preliminary phase. The traditional practice for screening cervical cancer is the examination of cervix tissues using the Papanicolaou (Pap) test. Manual inspection of pap smears involves false-negative outcomes due to human error even in the presence of the infected sample. Automated computer vision diagnosis revamps this obstacle and plays a substantial role in screening abnormal tissues affected due to cervical cancer. Here, in this paper, we propose a hybrid deep feature concatenated network (HDFCN) following two-step data augmentation to detect cervical cancer for binary and multiclass classification on the Pap smear images. This network carries out the classification of malignant samples for whole slide images (WSI) of the openly accessible SIPaKMeD database by utilizing the concatenation of features extracted from the fine-tuning of the deep learning (DL) models, namely, VGG-16, ResNet-152, and DenseNet-169, pretrained on the ImageNet dataset. The performance outcomes of the proposed model are compared with the individual performances of the aforementioned DL networks using transfer learning (TL). Our proposed model achieved an accuracy of 97.45% and 99.29% for 5-class and 2-class classifications, respectively. Additionally, the experiment is performed to classify liquid-based cytology (LBC) WSI data containing pap smear images.