Computer-aided Cervical Cancer Screening Method based on Multi-spectral Narrow-band Imaging

Abstract

The contrast of white colposcopy images is low, which is not conducive to the computer assisted identification of different degrees of diseased tissue. In order to improve the sampling accuracy under the image guidance of colposcopy, in this paper, we propose a Computer-aided cervical cancer screening method based on Multi-spectral Narrow-Band Imaging (CMNBI). We sequentially get images of cervical tissue under different illumination sources including white light, narrow-band blue light at a center wavelength of 415nm, and narrow-band green light at a center wavelength of 540nm. The multi-spectral pathology diagnosis methods consist of two stages: the first one is image preprocessing and the other is tissue classification. The image preprocessing algorithm consists of the following steps: First, we perform filtering process on three modes of images to remove noises. Secondly, the sequentially obtained images are spatially co-registered. Thirdly, the multiple narrow-band spectral images are fused. In the stage of tissue classification, a two-class K-means clustering algorithm is used, using clinics manually identified diseased region as the seed points. To eliminate strong specular reflection points of cervical tissue, we then applied improved K-means clustering algorithm combined with contour coefficient method to improve robustness of the proposed computer-aided cervical cancer screening method. To evaluate the proposed method, we apply the method to both the fused narrow-band multispectral images as well as the conventional white light images. As a result, the sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of CMNBI are all improved with the fused narrow-band multispectral images over that of the conventional white light images.