Improving computer-aided cervical cells classification using transfer learning based snapshot ensemble

Abstract

Cervical cells classification is a crucial component of computer-aided cervical cancer detection. Fine-grained classification is of great clinical importance when guiding clinical decisions on the diagnoses and treatment, which remains very challenging. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNN) provide a novel way to classify cervical cells by using automatically learned features. Although the ensemble of CNN models can increase model diversity and potentially boost the classification accuracy, it is a multi-step process, as several CNN models need to be trained respectively and then be selected for ensemble. On the other hand, due to the small training samples, the advantages of powerful CNN models may not be effectively leveraged. In order to address such a challenging issue, this paper proposes a transfer learning based snapshot ensemble (TLSE) method by integrating snapshot ensemble learning with transfer learning in a unified and coordinated way. Snapshot ensemble provides ensemble benefits within a single model training procedure, while transfer learning focuses on the small sample problem in cervical cells classification. Furthermore, a new training strategy is proposed for guaranteeing the combination. The TLSE method is evaluated on a pap-smear dataset called Herlev dataset and is proved to have some superiorities over the exiting methods. It demonstrates that TLSE can improve the accuracy in an ensemble manner with only one single training process for the small sample in fine-grained cervical cells classification.