Hybrid Loss-Constrained Lightweight Convolutional Neural Networks for Cervical Cell Classification
Wen Chen, Weiming Shen, Liang Gao, Xinyu Li
Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have resulted in remarkable achievements and conferred massive benefits to computer-aided systems in medical imaging. However, the worldwide usage of AI-based automation-assisted cervical cancer screening systems is hindered by computational cost and resource limitations. Thus, a highly economical and efficient model with enhanced classification ability is much more desirable. This paper proposes a hybrid loss function with label smoothing to improve the distinguishing power of lightweight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for cervical cell classification. The results strengthen our confidence in hybrid loss-constrained lightweight CNNs, which can achieve satisfactory accuracy with much lower computational cost for the SIPakMeD dataset. In particular, ShufflenetV2 obtained a comparable classification result (96.18% in accuracy, 96.30% in precision, 96.23% in recall, and 99.08% in specificity) with only one-seventh of the memory usage, one-sixth of the number of parameters, and one-fiftieth of total flops compared with Densenet-121 (96.79% in accuracy). GhostNet achieved an improved classification result (96.39% accuracy, 96.42% precision, 96.39% recall, and 99.09% specificity) with one-half of the memory usage, one-quarter of the number of parameters, and one-fiftieth of total flops compared with Densenet-121 (96.79% in accuracy). The proposed lightweight CNNs are likely to lead to an easily-applicable and cost-efficient automation-assisted system for cervical cancer diagnosis and prevention.