LEYTAS analysis of cytological specimens: the results of thousand cervical smears

This paper describes the application of a television-based system (LEYTAS) in machine analysis of cervical specimens. LEYTAS basically consists of a Leitz microscope, the texture analysis system (TAS, Leitz), a TV camera, a 4-bit grey value memory and a minicomputer (PDP 11/23). A series of 1176 Feulgen stained cervical smears has been analysed in an automated procedure using image transformation for cell selection and artefact rejection. During the analysis of the entire series new artefact rejection procedures have been added to the automated analysis. This addition decreased the percentage of false positives to 15% in the last 277 analysed smears. This percentage concerns machine performance alone. A rapid visual interaction procedure decreases this percentage to 9%. Out of 210 morphologically positive smears (diagnosis Papanicolaou class 3b or more) from the total series, one smear was missed by LEYTAS using the machine classification.