Cervical cancer prognosis and diagnosis using electrical impedance spectroscopy

Abstract

Electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) has been used as an adjunct to colposcopy for cervical cancer diagnosis for many years, Currently, the template match method is employed for EIS measurements analysis, where the measured EIS spectra are compared with the templates generated from three-dimensional finite element (FE) models of cancerous and non-cancerous cervical tissue, and the matches between the measured EIS spectra and the templates are then used to derive a score that indicates the association strength of the measured EIS to the High-Grade Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia (HG CIN). These FE models can be viewed as the computational versions of the associated physical tissue models. In this paper, the problem is revisited with an objective to develop a new method for EIS data analysis that might reveal the relationship between the change in the tissue structure due to disease and the change in the measured spectrum. This could provide us with important information to understand the histopathological mechanism that underpins the EIS-based HG CIN diagnostic decision making and the prognostic value of EIS for cervical cancer diagnosis. A further objective is to develop an alternative EIS data processing method for HG CIN detection that does not rely on physical models of tissues so as to facilitate extending the EIS technique to new medical diagnostic applications where the template spectra are not available.

Keywords

• electrical impedance spectroscopy (eis)
• cervical cancer
• diagnosis
• prognosis
• cole model
• spectrum curve fitting
• logistic regression
• classification