Methodology for structuring a dataset of cervical cell images for the for the study of malignancy changes associated in conventional Pap Test

The Pap test is a screening procedure used worldwide for the diagnosis of cervical cancer. The Malignancy Associated Changes (MAC) are slight morphological and textural changes that take place in the chromatin of the cell nucleus. Their study allows the early detection of several types of cancers. However, the number of data set for MAC studies is limited by the technical aspects that must be followed. In this work, we created a data set for the study of MAC in images of cervical cells from conventional cytology exams. To extract the characteristics of the nuclei, the color channels were separated by the contribution of Hematoxylin and Orange G6 dye, which identified morphological, illumination and texture characteristics. As a result, 1186 nuclei of patients either with some type of anomaly or without anomalies were obtained. To separate the regions of the nuclei, the non-linear regression function and the Watershed algorithm with an accuracy of 85.6 % were used. This data set contains adequate data to complement future work in MAC study of cervical cells from conventional pap smears.