Is Image Size Important? A Robustness Comparison of Deep Learning Methods for Multi-scale Cell Image Classification Tasks: from Convolutional Neural Networks to Visual Transformers

Cervical cancer is a very common and fatal cancer in women, but it can be prevented through early examination and treatment. Cytopathology images are often used to screen for cancer. Then, because of the possibility of artificial errors due to the large number of this method, the computer-aided diagnosis system based on deep learning is developed. The image input required by the deep learning method is usually consistent, but the size of the clinical medical image is inconsistent. The internal information is lost after resizing the image directly, so it is unreasonable. A lot of research is to directly resize the image, and the results are still robust. In order to find a reasonable explanation, 22 deep learning models are used to process images of different scales, and experiments are conducted on the SIPaKMeD dataset. The conclusion is that the deep learning method is very robust to the size changes of images. This conclusion is also validated on the Herlev dataset.