MSCI: A multistate dataset for colposcopy image classification of cervical cancer screening

Cervical cancer is the second most common female cancer globally, and it is vital to detect cervical cancer with low cost at an early stage using automated screening methods of high accuracy, especially in areas with insufficient medical resources. Automatic detection of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) can effectively prevent cervical cancer.

Due to the deficiency of standard and accessible colposcopy image datasets, we present a dataset containing 4753 colposcopy images acquired from 679 patients in three states (acetic acid reaction, green filter, and iodine test) for detection of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia. Based on this dataset, a new computer-aided method for cervical cancer screening was proposed.

We employed a wide range of methods to comprehensively evaluate our proposed dataset. Hand-crafted feature extraction methods and deep learning methods were used for the performance verification of the multistate colposcopy image (MSCI) dataset. Importantly, we propose a gated recurrent convolutional neural network (C-GCNN) for colposcopy image analysis that considers time series and combined multistate cervical images for CIN grading.

The experimental results showed that the proposed C-GCNN model achieves the best classification performance in CIN grading compared with hand-crafted feature extraction methods and classic deep learning methods. The results showed an accuracy of 96.87 %, a sensitivity of 95.68 %, and a specificity of 98.72 %.

A multistate colposcopy image dataset (MSCI) is proposed. A CIN grading model (C-GCNN) based on the MSCI dataset is established, which provides a potential method for automated cervical cancer screening.