Abstract
Cervical cancer (CCa) is the fourth most prevalent and common cancer affecting women worldwide, with increasing incidence and mortality rates. Hence, early detection of CCa plays a crucial role in improving outcomes. Non-invasive imaging procedures with good diagnostic performance are desirable and have the potential to lessen the degree of intervention associated with the gold standard, biopsy. Recently, artificial intelligence-based diagnostic models such as Vision Transformers (ViT) have shown promising performance in image classification tasks, rivaling or surpassing traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs). This paper studies the effect of applying a ViT to predict CCa using different image benchmark datasets. A newly developed approach (ViT-PSO-SVM) was presented for boosting the results of the ViT based on integrating the ViT with particle swarm optimization (PSO), and support vector machine (SVM). First, the proposed framework extracts features from the Vision Transformer. Then, PSO is used to reduce the complexity of extracted features and optimize feature representation. Finally, a softmax classification layer is replaced with an SVM classification model to precisely predict CCa. The models are evaluated using two benchmark cervical cell image datasets, namely SipakMed and Herlev, with different classification scenarios: two, three, and five classes. The proposed approach achieved 99.112% accuracy and 99.113% F1-score for SipakMed with two classes and achieved 97.778% accuracy and 97.805% F1-score for Herlev with two classes outperforming other Vision Transformers, CNN models, and pre-trained models. Finally, GradCAM is used as an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) tool to visualize and understand the regions of a given image that are important for a model's prediction. The obtained experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of the developed ViT-PSO-SVM approach and hold the promise of providing a robust, reliable, accurate, and non-invasive diagnostic tool that will lead to improved healthcare outcomes worldwide.