A hybrid learning network with progressive resizing and PCA for diagnosis of cervical cancer on WSI slides

Current artificial intelligence (AI) trends are revolutionizing medical image processing, greatly improving cervical cancer diagnosis. Machine learning (ML) algorithms can discover patterns and anomalies in medical images, whereas deep learning (DL) methods, specifically convolutional neural networks (CNNs), are extremely accurate at identifying malignant lesions. Deep models that have been pre-trained and tailored through transfer learning and fine-tuning become faster and more effective, even when data is scarce. This paper implements a state-of-the-art Hybrid Learning Network that combines the Progressive Resizing approach and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for enhanced cervical cancer diagnostics of whole slide images (WSI) slides. ResNet-152 and VGG-16, two fine-tuned DL models, are employed together with transfer learning to train on augmented and progressively resized training data with dimensions of 224 × 224, 512 × 512, and 1024 × 1024 pixels for enhanced feature extraction. Principal component analysis (PCA) is subsequently employed to process the combined features extracted from two DL models and reduce the dimensional space of the feature set. Furthermore, two ML methods, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) models, are trained on this reduced feature set, and their predictions are integrated using a majority voting approach for evaluating the final classification results, thereby enhancing overall accuracy and reliability. The accuracy of the suggested framework on SIPaKMeD data is 99.29% for two-class classification and 98.47% for five-class classification. Furthermore, it achieves 100% accuracy for four-class categorization on the LBC dataset.