UniCAS: A foundation model for cervical cytology screening

Cervical abnormality screening is pivotal for prevention and treatment. However, the substantial size of whole slide images (WSIs) makes examination labor-intensive and time-consuming. Current deep learning-based approaches struggle with the morphological diversity of cervical cytology and require specialized models for distinct diagnostic tasks, leading to fragmented workflows. Here, we present UniCAS, a cytology foundation model pre-trained on 48,532 cervical WSIs encompassing diverse patient demographics and pathological conditions. UniCAS enables various clinical analysis tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance in slide-level diagnosis, region-level analysis, and pixel-level image enhancement. In particular, by integrating a multi-task aggregator for slide-level diagnosis, UniCAS achieves area under the curve (AUC) values of 92.60%, 92.58%, and 98.39% for cancer screening, candidiasis testing, and clue cell diagnosis, respectively, while reducing diagnostic time by 70% compared with conventional approaches. This work establishes a paradigm for efficient multi-scale analysis in automated cervical cytology, bridging the gap between computational pathology and clinical diagnostic workflows.