Staging of cervical cancer with soft computing.

Abstract

This paper describes a way of designing a hybrid decision support system in soft computing paradigm for detecting the different stages of cervical cancer. Hybridization includes the evolution of knowledge-based subnetwork modules with genetic algorithms (GA's) using rough set theory and the Interactive Dichotomizer 3 (ID3) algorithm. Crude subnetworks obtained via rough set theory and the ID3 algorithm are evolved using GA's. The evolution uses a restricted mutation operator which utilizes the knowledge of the modular structure, already generated, for faster convergence. The GA tunes the network weights and structure simultaneously. The aforesaid integration enhances the performance in terms of classification score, network size and training time, as compared to the conventional multilayer perceptron. This methodology also helps in imposing a structure on the weights, which results in a network more suitable for extraction of logical rules and human interpretation of the inferencing procedure.