Detection of Cervical Cancer Cells in Whole Slide Images Using Deformable and Global Context Aware Faster RCNN-FPN

Cervical cancer is a worldwide public health problem with a high rate of illness and mortality among women. In this study, we proposed a novel framework based on Faster RCNN-FPN architecture for the detection of abnormal cervical cells in cytology images from a cancer screening test. We extended the Faster RCNN-FPN model by infusing deformable convolution layers into the feature pyramid network (FPN) to improve scalability. Furthermore, we introduced a global contextual aware module alongside the Region Proposal Network (RPN) to enhance the spatial correlation between the background and the foreground. Extensive experimentations with the proposed deformable and global context aware (DGCA) RCNN were carried out using the cervical image dataset of “Digital Human Body” Vision Challenge from the Alibaba Cloud TianChi Company. Performance evaluation based on the mean average precision (mAP) and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve has demonstrated considerable advantages of the proposed framework. Particularly, when combined with tagging of the negative image samples using traditional computer-vision techniques, 6–9% increase in mAP has been achieved. The proposed DGCA-RCNN model has potential to become a clinically useful AI tool for automated detection of cervical cancer cells in whole slide images of Pap smear.