*Article* **Cervical Net: A Novel Cervical Cancer Classification Using Feature Fusion**

**Hiam Alquran 1,2, Mohammed Alsalatie 3, Wan Azani Mustafa 4,5,\*, Rabah Al Abdi <sup>2</sup> and Ahmad Rasdan Ismail 6,\***


**Abstract:** Cervical cancer, a common chronic disease, is one of the most prevalent and curable cancers among women. Pap smear images are a popular technique for screening cervical cancer. This study proposes a computer-aided diagnosis for cervical cancer utilizing the novel Cervical Net deep learning (DL) structures and feature fusion with Shuffle Net structural features. Image acquisition and enhancement, feature extraction and selection, as well as classification are the main steps in our cervical cancer screening system. Automated features are extracted using pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNN) fused with a novel Cervical Net structure in which 544 resultant features are obtained. To minimize dimensionality and select the most important features, principal component analysis (PCA) is used as well as canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to obtain the best discriminant features for five classes of Pap smear images. Here, five different machine learning (ML) algorithms are fed into these features. The proposed strategy achieved the best accuracy ever obtained using a support vector machine (SVM), in which fused features between Cervical Net and Shuffle Net is 99.1% for all classes.

**Keywords:** pap smear; cervical net; shuffle net; canonical correlation analysis (CCA); support vector machine (SVM); random forest (RF); k-nearest neighbour (KNN); artificial neural network (ANN)
