A two-stream decision fusion network for cervical pap-smear image classification tasks

Deep learning, especially Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs), has demonstrated superior performance in image recognition and classification tasks. They make complex pattern recognition possible by extracting image features through layers of abstraction. However, despite the excellent performance of deep learning in general image classification, its limitations are becoming apparent in specific domains such as cervical cell medical image classification. This is because although the morphology of cervical cells varies between normal, diseased and cancerous, these differences are sometimes very small and difficult to capture. To solve this problem, we propose a two-stream feature fusion model comprising a manual feature branch, a deep feature branch, and a decision fusion module. Specifically, We process cervical cells through a modified DarkNet backbone network to extract deep features. In order to enhance the learning of deep features, we have devised scale convolution blocks to substitute the original convolution, termed Basic convolution blocks. The manual feature branch comprises a range of traditional features and is linked to a multilayer perceptron. Additionally, we design three decision feature channels trained from both manual and deep features to enhance the model performance in cervical cell classification. Our proposed model demonstrates superior performance when compared to state-of-the-art cervical cell classification models. We establish a 15-category 148762 cervical cytopathology image dataset (CCID). In addition, we additionally conducted experiments on the SIPaKMeD dataset. Numerous experiments show that our proposed model performs excellently compared to state-of-the-art classification models. The outcomes illustrate that our approach can significantly aid pathologists in accurately evaluating cervical smears. •A cervical cell classification model is proposed that uses manual feature fitting as an auxiliary task to help the model extract discriminative features.•Fusion decision mechanisms is proposed for predicting the correct cervical classification of the three channels of the trained model. All three channels generate a score for each cervical image. The fusion operation serves to maximize the score for the correct cervix category regardless of the predictions for the three channels.•We evaluated the proposed method on several datasets. By comparing our method with various state-of-the-art methods, we validated its effectiveness. In add