Automated Diagnosis of Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia in Histology Images via Deep Learning

Artificial intelligence has enabled the automated diagnosis of several cancer types. We aimed to develop and validate deep learning models that automatically classify cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) based on histological images. Microscopic images of CIN3, CIN2, CIN1, and non-neoplasm were obtained. The performances of two pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) models adopting DenseNet-161 and EfficientNet-B7 architectures were evaluated and compared with those of pathologists. The dataset comprised 1,106 images from 588 patients; images of 10% of patients were included in the test dataset. The mean accuracies for the 4-class classification were 88.5% (95% confidence interval [CI], 86.3–90.6%) by DenseNet-161 and 89.5% (95% CI, 83.3–95.7%) by EfficientNet-B7, which were similar to human performance (93.2% and 89.7%). The mean per-class area under the receiver operating characteristic curve values by EfficientNet-B7 were 0.996, 0.990, and 0.971 in the non-neoplasm, CIN3, CIN1 groups, respectively. The class activation map detected the diagnostic area for CIN lesions. In the 3-class classification of CIN2 and CIN3 as one group, the mean accuracies of DenseNet-161 and EfficientNet-B7 increased to 91.4% (95% CI, 88.8–94.0%) and 92.6% (95% CI, 90.4–94.9%), respectively. CNN-based deep learning is a promising tool for diagnosing CIN lesions on digital histological images.