Note: This research product won a gold medal at the International Trade Fair (Ideas-Inventions-New Products) held at the Nuremberg Exhibition Center, Germany from 3 to 6 November 2005.
Researchers:
Dr. Nor Ashidi Mat Isa
Rosniwati Ghafar
Prof. Nor Hayati Othman
Sariah Rajuli
(Contact details of Dr. Nor Ashidi Mat Isa is available only to registered journalists)
DataPap is the first database system that gathers patient's personal details, medical report and Pap smear images in a single database. It will overcome the problem of storing and retrieving of glass slides Pap smears and paper hand written reports of the conventional practice. The images of the Pap smears will be stored at the magnifications of 10x and 40x in form of computer images to avoid colour degradation, thus restaining of the old slides is avoidable.
DataPap provides intensive search facilities by Patient's Name, Slide Number, Registration Number, Laboratory Number, etc. It is based on a local (single-tier) database system, which can be run on a personal computer or a server.
DataPap is not just a database but it also provides intensive image processing and automatic diagnostic functions. Various image processing facilities such as contrast enhancement, segmentation and edge detection are provided to enhance the features of the Pap smear images. Different image processing techniques could be used to enhance certain features of cells images.
These facilities are very useful for pathologists in performing their diagnosis of difficult cases and improperly stained slides.
DataPap also provides an automatic diagnosis facility based on Artificial Neural Network (ANN). ANN will extract the features automatically from cervical cells and give the diagnosis according to Bethesda standard. This automatic diagnostic function produces high accuracy, sensitivity and specificity, where in our test the system produced 94.29%, 89.42% and 100.00% respectively.
The system also kept the false negative and false positive to some considerably low values, which are 5.29% and 3.94% respectively. This function could be used by pathologist as a second opinion for difficult cases or as a mass screening tool by technologists. Therefore, DataPap is a versatile database system and also diagnostic tool for cervical cancer.
