A low-cost platform for automated cervical cytology: addressing health and socioeconomic challenges in low-resource...

Cervical cancer remains a significant health challenge around the globe, with particularly high prevalence in low- and middle-income countries. This disease is preventable and curable if detected in early stages, making regular screening critically important. Cervical cytology, the most widely used screening method, has proven highly effective in reducing cervical cancer incidence and mortality in high income countries. However, its effectiveness in low-resource settings has been limited, among other factors, by insufficient diagnostic infrastructure and a shortage of trained healthcare personnel.

This paper introduces the development of a low-cost microscopy platform designed to address these limitations by enabling automatic reading of cervical cytology slides. The system features a robotized microscope capable of slide scanning, autofocus, and digital image capture, while supporting the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. All at a production cost below 500 USD. A dataset of nearly 2,000 images, captured with the custom-built microscope and covering seven distinct cervical cellular types relevant in cytologic analysis, was created. This dataset was then used to fine-tune and test several pre-trained models for classifying between images containing normal and abnormal cell subtypes.

Most of the tested models showed good performance for properly classifying images containing abnormal and normal cervical cells, with sensitivities above 90%. Among these models, MobileNet demonstrated the highest accuracy in detecting abnormal cell types, achieving sensitivities of 98.26% and 97.95%, specificities of 88.91% and 88.72%, and F-scores of 96.42% and 96.23% on the validation and test sets, respectively.

The results indicate that MobileNet might be a suitable model for real-world deployment on the low-cost platform, offering high precision and efficiency in classifying cervical cytology images. This system presents a first step towards a promising solution for improving cervical cancer screening in low-resource settings.