A Semi-supervised Deep Learning Method for Cervical Cell Classification

Currently, the Thinprep cytologic test (TCT) is the most popular cervical cancer cytology test technique. It can detect precancerous conditions and microbial infections. However, this technique entirely relies on manual operation and doctors’ naked eye observation, resulting in a heavy workload and low accuracy rate. Recently, automatic pathological diagnosis has been developed to solve this problem. Cervical cell classification is a key technology in the intelligent cervical cancer diagnosis system. Training a deep neural network-based classification model requires a large amount of data. However, cervical cell labeling requires specialized physicians and the cost of labeling is high, resulting in a lack of sufficient labeling data in this field. To address this problem, we propose a method to ensure high accuracy in cervical cell classification with a small amount of labeled data by introducing manual features and a voting mechanism to achieve data expansion in semi-supervised learning. The method consists of three main steps, using a clarity function to filter out high-quality cervical cell images, annotating a small amount of them, and balancing the training data using a voting mechanism. With a small amount of labeled data, the accuracy of the proposed method in this paper can reach to 91.94%.