[Early cancer diagnosis through automated cytoanalysis (Fazytan system)]

A prescreening system for the early detection of uterine cancer was developed. For the diagnosis of each input specimen (PAP-stained), a figure of malignancy has to be calculated automatically. Methods, problems and results of the system are summarized in this paper. Some thousand microscopic subfields of a specimen are successively scanned by an optimized TV-camera with high spatial resolution. The automated specimen analysis can be described by a two step procedure: single cell classification and evaluation of cell population. For the single cell classifier only features derived from the nucleus are used. The pattern recognition procedures are based on a processor-oriented strategy, and can be adapted to other cytological specimen. The algorithms have been tested with 3 . 10(5) cell images of about 300 specimens.