CervicoXNet: an automated cervicogram interpretation network

Visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) is a pre-cancerous screening program for low–middle-income countries (LMICs). Due to the limited number of oncology-gynecologist clinicians in LMICs, VIA examinations are performed mainly by medical workers. However, the inability of the medical workers to recognize a significant pattern based on cervicograms, VIA examination produces high inter-observer variance and high false-positive rate. This study proposed an automated cervicogram interpretation using explainable convolutional neural networks named “CervicoXNet” to support medical workers decision. The total number of 779 cervicograms was used for the learning process: 487 with VIA ( +) and 292 with VIA ( −). We performed data augmentation process under a geometric transformation scenario, such process produces 7325 cervicogram with VIA ( −) and 7242 cervicogram with VIA ( +). The proposed model outperformed other deep learning models, with 99.22% accuracy, 100% sensitivity, and 98.28% specificity. Moreover, to test the robustness of the proposed model, colposcope images used to validate the model’s generalization ability. The results showed that the proposed architecture still produced satisfactory performance, with 98.11% accuracy, 98.33% sensitivity, and 98% specificity. It can be proven that the proposed model has been achieved satisfactory results. To make the prediction results visually interpretable, the results are localized with a heat map in fine-grained pixels using a combination of Grad-CAM and guided backpropagation. CervicoXNet can be used an alternative early screening tool with VIA alone.