CerviXpert: A Multi-Structural Convolutional Neural Network for Predicting Cervix Type and Cervical Cell Abnormalities

Cervical cancer affects millions of women worldwide and has a significantly higher survival rate when diagnosed early. Pap smears and cervical biopsies are vital screening tools for detecting such cancer. However, the success of these screening processes depends on the skills of cytologists. A recent trend in diagnostic cytology is to apply machine-learning-based models to classify cancer using cell images. These automated models have been shown to perform just as well as, or even better than, expert cytologists. Some notable methods for classifying cervix cancers include ResNet50, VGG16, MobileNetV2, and InceptionV3, based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). However, these methods are computationally expensive. We present CerviXpert, a multi-structural Convolutional Neural Network, to identify cervix cancer. We perform extensive experiments on a publicly available dataset, SiPaKMeD, to show the efficacy of our method. CerviXpert presents a promising solution for efficient cervical cancer screening and diagnosis by striking a balance between accuracy and practical feasibility.