For cervical cancer diagnosis: Tissue Raman spectroscopy and multi-level feature fusion with SENet attention mechanism

Cervical cancer ranks among the most prevalent forms of gynecological malignancies. Timely identification of cervical lesions and prompt intervention can effectively prevent the development of cervical cancer or enhance patients' chances of survival. In this study, we propose an innovative method based on Raman spectroscopy, i.e., a multi-level SENet attention mechanism feature fusion architecture (MAFA) for rapid diagnosis of cervical cancer and precancerous lesions. The convolution process of this architecture can extract features from shallow to deep layers, and the attention mechanism is added to achieve the fusion of features from different layers. The added attention mechanism can automatically determine the importance of each layer feature channel and assign weight values to that layer according to the importance of each layer to achieve the purpose of focusing the model on certain waveform features and improve the targeting of model learning. We collected Raman spectra of 212 cervical tissues containing cervical cancer and its precancerous lesions.The experimental results show that MAFA can effectively improve the diagnostic accuracy of VGGNet, GoogLeNet and ResNet models in the validation of Raman spectral data of cervical tissue. Among them, ResNet performed the best, with the highest average accuracy, precision, recall and F1-Score of 82.36%, 84.00%, 82.35% and 82.26%, respectively, when no feature fusion was performed. The evaluation metrics improved by 4.91%, 3.97%, 4.97%, and 5.06%, respectively, after using the MAFA; they also improved by 4.16%, 2.90%, 4.17%, and 4.32%, respectively, compared with the model that directly performs feature fusion without using the attention mechanism. Therefore, the MAFA proposed in this study is better than that of the neural network that directly fuses the features of each convolutional layer. The experimental results show that the performance of the MAFA proposed in this paper is significantly higher than that of traditional deep learning algorithms, indicating that the present architecture can effectively improve the diagnostic accuracy of deep learning networks for cervical cancer.