THE USE OF AN AUTOMATED IMAGE CYTOMETER FOR SCREENING AND QUANTITATIVE ASSESSMENT OF CERVICAL LESIONS IN THE BRITISH-COLUMBIA CERVICAL SMEAR SCREENING-PROGRAM

The development of an automated device to screen cervical cytology sli des for the detection of pre-invasive lesions of the cervix has been t he goal of many individuals for over 30 years. The increasing sophisti cation of the technology of automation and increasingly powerful compu ter technology have enabled a number of these systems to reach the sta ge at which they have become a practical reality. The Department of Ca ncer Imaging at the British Columbia Cancer Agency has developed such a device over the past few years. This study reports the preliminary r esults of a trial to determine the reliability of the device for the s creening and quantitative assessment of cervical cells. A training set of over 1000 cervical slides was used to train the image cytometer. A test set of 1030 slides was screened by the image cytometer and in th e Cytology Screening Laboratory. At the 50% sample split the sensitivi ty of the image cytometer was 95% for severe dysplasia and 90% for mod erate dysplasia, compared with a sensitivity of 90% for both of these lesions using conventional screening. A combination of nuclear texture features was found which can be used for the quantitative assessment of both abnormal cells and apparently normal intermediate cells.