Complete three‐phase detection framework for identifying abnormal cervical cells

Automatic identification of abnormal cervical cells, including feature representation, feature combination and classification strategy, is highly demanded in women's annual cervical cancer screenings. However, previous methods only deal with one or two of these three phases, and currently there is few complete framework for this problem. A novel three‐phrase boosting framework is proposed for the detection of abnormal cells from cervical smear images. First, the authors extract 160 dimensional features with respect to each cervical cell from three aspects, including cytology morphology, chromatin pathology and region intensity. In particular, 106 dimensional chromatin pathology features are newly adopted to describe the nucleus textural transformation. Second, an adaptive feature combination method is introduced to select the optimal feature patterns, which can combine all features using a reinforced margin‐based approach with the heuristic knowledge. Finally, a two‐stage classification strategy is presented to reduce erroneous classification abnormal cells using two different classifiers. Experimental results achieve state‐of‐the‐art performance and the proposed framework outperforms the other 16 compared detection methods.