Explainable Artificial Intelligence Driven Segmentation for Cervical Cancer Screening

Cervical cancer remains an important global health challenge among women. Early and accurate identification of abnormal cervical cells is crucial for effective treatment and improved survival rates. This paper addresses the development of a novel weakly supervised segmentation framework that combines binary classification, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques and GraphCut to automate cervical cancer screening. Unlike traditional segmentation methods that rely on pixel-level annotations of medical images, which are costly, laborious, and require expertise in medical imaging, our approach leverages classification-driven insights to segment the nucleus, cytoplasm, and background regions. Among the classification models evaluated, VGG16-Adapted128 achieved the highest performance, marked by an accuracy of 0.94, precision of 0.94, recall of 0.94, and an F1 score of 0.94. This novel segmentation framework employed LRP and GradCAM++ as XAI techniques to gain insight into the decision-making process of classification models, with GradCAM++ demonstrating greater effectiveness. This innovative approach to segmentation is formally introduced through two algorithms detailed in this paper. The weakly supervised segmentation framework achieved a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 62.05% and an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 61.89%. In addition, it received high satisfaction ratings from expert evaluations and has been seamlessly integrated into a user-friendly web application, offering clinicians a transparent and reliable tool to improve the precision of decision-making in the detection of cervical cancer. Although these results mark an initial step in this innovative direction, this work is significant in laying the foundation for advancing weakly supervised segmentation techniques in cervical cancer screening.