COMPUTER-ASSISTED PRIMARY SCREENING OF CERVICAL SMEARS USING THE PAPNET METHOD - COMPARISON WITH CONVENTIONAL SCREENING AND EVALUATION OF THE ROLE OF THE CYTOLOGIST

The PAPNET method is an interactive computer-assisted screening proced ure. The diagnostician selects the abnormal video tiles out of the 128 and decides which smears need additional light microscopy. The origin al diagnoses of 1494 archival smears were compared with the PAPNET ana lysis of the same smears. The general trend observed was that the PAPN ET-assisted diagnoses were of a higher grade than those assigned by th e primary screener, thus less cases were signed out as negative. In ad dition, the PAPNET method was used for primary screening of 2971 rando mly selected smears, whilst in the same period 5797 smears were conven tionally screened. Using the PAPNET method, significantly fewer smears were signed out as negative. Seventy-three percent of the cases were diagnosed on the basis of the information provided by the 128 video ti les, 11% had to be screened completely by the light microscope, and th e remaining cases needed additional light microscopy of a part of the smear. As a result, PAPNET-assisted screening was approximately two ti mes faster. The great advantage of the method is that it is much less tiring for the eyes than conventional screening, making fatigue-relate d errors less likely, and if a smear contains only a few abnormal cell s, these are easier to find.