Cervical cancer diagnosis based on cytology pap smear image classification using fractional coefficient and machine learning classifiers

Abstract

Doctors and pathologists have long been concerned about determining the malignancy from cell images. This task is laborious, time-consuming and needs expertise. Due to this reason, automated systems assist pathologists in providing a second opinion to arrive at accurate decision based on cytology images. The classification of cytology images has always been a difficult challenge among the various image analysis approaches due to its extreme intricacy. The thrust for early diagnosis of cervical cancer has always fuelled the research in medical image analysis for cancer detection. In this paper, an investigative study for the classification of cytology images is proposed. The proposed study uses the discrete coefficient transform (DCT) coefficient and Haar transform coefficients as features. These features are given as a input to seven different machine learning algorithms for normal and abnormal pap smear images classification. In order to optimize the feature size, fractional coefficients are used to form the five different sizes of feature vectors. In the proposed work, DCT transform has given the highest classification accuracy of 81.11%. Comparing the different machine learning algorithms the overall best performance is given by the random forest classifier.