Feasibility of Using Mobile Smartphone Camera as an Imaging Device for Screening of the Cervix in a Low-resource Setting: Diagnostic test accuracy study

Abstract

Cervical Cancer is now the leading cause of cancer mortality among women in developing countries (Ferley et al., 2002). Cervical carcinoma arises from normal cervical epithelium through the progressive development of low grade and high grade cervical intraepithelial lesions (CINs) (Olusola et al., 2019). Cervical cancer is the third most frequent cancer after breast and colorectal cancer. It is the second most frequent cancer among women (Millien et al., 2015) Cervical cancer remains an important public health issue in many low-resource countries where the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is not widely available and effective screening coverage is low (Huchko et al., 2019) The increasing trend of the disease in developing countries is attributed to the early beginning of sexual activities, certain sexual behaviours like high number of multiple partners, early age at first intercourse, infrequent use of condoms, multiple pregnancies with Chlamydia association and immunosuppression with HIV, which is related to higher risk of HPV infection (Tsikouras et al., 2016). Many of the developing countries lack the resources to establish traditional, cytology-based cervical cancer prevention programs (Pimple et al., 2016).