CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
One of the curable kinds of caners in women is known as cervical cancer if diagnosed on time. Cervical cancer, in some cases are caused as a result of infection with certain kinds of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) (Ami and Singh, 2016). Women with early sexual life or with several sexual partners are high risk of contracting HPV and in the end cervical cancer. However, those with one sexual partner could be infected also. Women above the age of 30 in the developed countries and are at high risk of HPV infection are vaccinated with HPV vaccines to mitigate the changes of having the diseases (Chelmow, 2016).
Conventionally, optical tests such as VIA, cervicography and colposcopy that utilize direct visual check of the cervix are widely used today as a diagnostic tool. Healthcare professionals study the cervix at about one minute after applying the 5% acetic acid to the cervix area. Acetowhite region (AW), which is the suspected region of cervix, and other vascular abnormalities such as mosaicism, punctuation and vasculature may appear (Chigbu and Onyebuchi, 2014).
Cervical cancer is second only to breast cancer as the highest cause of cancer-related death of women in the world. In 2015, it was the fourth leading cause of cancer death in women worldwide with an estimate of about 75,700 deaths (Singh and Jemal, 2017).
Unfortunately, up to 90% of these deaths occurred in the developing nations of the world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa; 60,100 deaths in Africa, 28,600 in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 144,400 in Asia. India, the second most populous country in the world, accounted for 28,600. Latin America and the Caribbean, accounted for 25% (67,500) of cervical cancer deaths (Gupta, Gupta, Mehrotra and Sodhani, 2017).
The main reason for this discrepancy is the lack of organized, population-wide, screening programmes and medical personnel to administer and translate various test involved [6].
This thesis work seeks to address the problem of the lack of medical personnel to administer and translate various test by coming up with the automation of cervical cancer detection using digital images of low resolution, deployed on Android mobile devices.
1.1 Problem Statement
More than 80% of the total deaths recorded due to cervical cancer in women have occurred in sub-Saharan Africa. The absence of both the resources for screening to aid early detection, and most importantly, the scarcity of medical personnel to interpret these results is the major contributing factor. Hence, the need to design an Android application, which performs; the analysis and classifies cervix digital image. This will be very useful in the areas with limited or no medical experts.
1.2 Motivation and Purpose
The development in mobile computing in the recent year has made it a great tool in healthcare [5]. These devices are gaining more acceptability due to their portability and reduced price. We are not aware of any existing work done in the deployment of an automated cervical cancer detection tool on mobile platform....
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