Spectroscopic Detection of Cervical Pre-Cancer through Radial Basis Function Networks

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 9 (NIPS 1996)

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Authors

Kagan Tumer, Nirmala Ramanujam, Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Joydeep Ghosh

Abstract

The mortality related to cervical cancer can be substantially re(cid:173) duced through early detection and treatment. However, cur(cid:173) rent detection techniques, such as Pap smear and colposcopy, fail to achieve a concurrently high sensitivity and specificity. In vivo fluorescence spectroscopy is a technique which quickly, non(cid:173) invasively and quantitatively probes the biochemical and morpho(cid:173) logical changes that occur in pre-cancerous tissue. RBF ensemble algorithms based on such spectra provide automated, and near real(cid:173) time implementation of pre-cancer detection in the hands of non(cid:173) experts. The results are more reliable, direct and accurate than those achieved by either human experts or multivariate statistical algorithms.