IMPROVEMENT OF THE METHOD OF THE MULTICLASS PAP SMEAR IMAGE SEGMENTATION BASED ON CROSS-DOMAIN TRANSFER LEARNING WITH LIMITED DATA
Nurtay M. Alina G. Tau A.
2026Technology Center
Eastern-European Journal of Enterprise Technologies
2026#1Issue 947 - 55 pp.
This study examined automated multi-class semantic segmentation of Pap smear images used for cervical cancer detection. The effectiveness of existing deep learning methods is often limited due to a lack of labeled data, high morphological variability of cervical cells, overlapping structures, noise, low contrast, and imaging artifacts characteristic of cytology specimens. In this study, the authors propose a cross-domain transfer learning approach that adapts pre-trained deep neural networks to the task of multi-class Pap smear segmentation. All networks were pre-trained on large-scale natural image datasets. In the experiments, both convolutional neural networks and Transformer-based models, including hybrid configurations, were refined and systematically compared. Network performance was assessed using quantitative metrics (Dice score, IoU, HD95), as well as qualitative visual assessment of segmentation edges and boundaries. The results obtained from the experiments showed that Transformer-based architectures, in particular SegFormer, significantly outperform convolutional models when processing noisy and heterogeneous cytological data. Using specialized data augmentation strategies developed specifically for medical imaging, SegFormer increased Dice scores to 0.95 across all classes (healthy, unhealthy, rubbish, both cells), as well as improved edge accuracy and robustness to artifacts and cell aliasing. Multi-scale feature extraction and global context modeling proved essential for accurately identifying cellular structures in data-constrained settings. The results obtained in the study can help in the development of reliable automated diagnostic tools to assist cytopathologists, as well as to improve the overall accuracy and efficiency of cervical cancer screening programs Copyright
cervical cancer , deep learning , Pap smear , segmentation , transfer learning
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Department of Information and Computing Systems, Abylkas Saginov Karaganda Technical University, N. Nazarbayev ave., 56, Karagandy, 100027, Kazakhstan
Department of Information and Computing Systems, Abylkas Saginov Karaganda Technical University, N. Nazarbayev ave., 56, Karagandy, 100027, Kazakhstan
Department of Information and Computing Systems
Department of Information and Computing Systems
10 лет помогаем публиковать статьи Международный издатель
Книга Публикация научной статьи Волощук 2026 Book Publication of a scientific article 2026