Abstract
Cervical cancer is one of the biggest challenges in global health, thus it forms a critical need for early detection technologies that could improve patient prognosis and inform treatment decisions. This development in the form of an early detection mechanism increases the chances of successful treatment and survival, as early diagnosis promptly offers interventions that can dramatically reduce the rate of deaths attributed to this disease. Here, a customized Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model is proposed for cervical cancerous cell detection. It includes three convolutional layers with increasing filter sizes and max-pooling layers, followed by dropout and dense layers for improved feature extraction and robust learning. By using ResNet models as inspiration, the model further innovates by incorporating skip connections into the CNN design. By enabling direct feature transmission from earlier to later layers, skip links enhance gradient flow and help preserve important spatial information. By boosting feature propagation, this integration increases the model's ability to recognize minute patterns in cervical cell images, hence increasing classification accuracy. In our methodology, the SIPaKMeD dataset has been employed which contains 4049 cervical cell images that are arranged into five different categories. To address class imbalance, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been applied for data augmentation; that is, synthetic images have been created, that improve the diversity of the dataset and further enhance the robustness of the same. The present model is astonishingly accurate in classifying five cervical cell types: koilocytes, superficial-intermediate, parabasal, dyskeratotic, and metaplastic, thus significantly enhancing early detection and diagnosis of cervical cancer. The model gives an excellent performance because it has a validation accuracy of 99.11% and a training accuracy of 99.82%. It is a reliable model in the diagnosis of cervical cancerous cells because it ensures advancement in the computer-assisted cervical cancer detection system.