Optimization of Classification Strategies of Acetowhite Temporal Patterns towards Improving Diagnostic Performance of Colposcopy

Efforts have been being made to improve the diagnostic performance of colposcopy, trying to help better diagnose cervical cancer, particularly in developing countries. However, improvements in a number of areas are still necessary, such as the time it takes to process the full digital image of the cervix, the performance of the computing systems used to identify different kinds of tissues, and biopsy sampling. In this paper, we explore three different, well-known automatic classification methods (k-Nearest Neighbors, Naïve Bayes, and C4.5), in addition to different data models that take full advantage of this information and improve the diagnostic performance of colposcopy based on acetowhite temporal patterns. Based on the ROC and PRC area scores, the k-Nearest Neighbors and discrete PLA representation performed better than other methods. The values of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy reached using this method were 60% (95% CI 50–70), 79% (95% CI 71–86), and 70% (95% CI 60–80), respectively. The acetowhitening phenomenon is not exclusive to high-grade lesions, and we have found acetowhite temporal patterns of epithelial changes that are not precancerous lesions but that are similar to positive ones. These findings need to be considered when developing more robust computing systems in the future.