Classification of stages in cervical cancer MRI by customized CNN and transfer learning

Cervical cancer is the common cancer among women, where early-stage diagnoses of cervical cancer lead to recovery from the deadly cervical cancer. Correct cervical cancer staging is predominant to decide the treatment. Hence, cervical cancer staging is an important problem in designing automatic detection and diagnosing applications of the medical field. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) often plays a greater role in object identification and classification. The performance of CNN in medical image classification can already compete with radiologists. In this paper, we planned to build a deep Capsule Network (CapsNet) for medical image classification that can achieve high accuracy using cervical cancer Magnetic Resonance (MR) images. In this study, a customized deep CNN model is developed using CapsNet to automatically predict the cervical cancer from MR images. In CapsNet, each layer receives input from all preceding layers, which helps to classify the features. The hyper parameters are estimated and it controls the backpropagation gradient at the initial learning. To improve the CapsNet performance, residual blocks are included between dense layers. Training and testing are performed with around 12,771 T2-weighted MR images of the TCGA-CESC dataset publicly available for research work. The results show that the accuracy of Customized CNN using CapsNetis higher and behaves well in classifying the cervical cancer. Thus, it is evident that CNN models can be used in developing automatic image analysis tools in the medical field.