False Positive Suppression in Cervical Cell Screening via Attention-Guided Semi-supervised Learning

Cervical cancer is one of the primary factors that endanger women’s health, and Thinprep cytologic test (TCT) is the common testing tool for the early diagnosis of cervical cancer. However, it is tedious and time-consuming for pathologists to assess and find abnormal cells in many TCT samples. Thus, automatic detection of abnormal cervical cells is highly demanded. Nevertheless, false positive cells are inevitable after automatic detection. It is still a burden for the pathologist if the false positive rate is high. To this end, here we propose a semi-supervised cervical cell diagnosis method that can significantly reduce the false positive rate. First, we incorporate a detection network to localize the suspicious abnormal cervical cells. Then, we design a semi-supervised classification network to identify whether the cervical cells are truly abnormal or not. To boost the performance of the semi-supervised classification network, and make full use of the localizing information derived from the detection network, we use the predicted bounding boxes of the detection network as an additional constraint for the attention masks from the classification network. Besides, we also develop a novel consistency constraint between the teacher and student models to guarantee the robustness of the network. Our experimental results show that our network can achieve satisfactory classification accuracy using only a limited number of labeled cells, and also greatly reduce the false positive rate in cervical cell detection.