[The cervico-vaginal smear. What is new with the Papanicolaou method in 1996?]

Recently, quality control became one of the priorities of cytopathology applied to screening for carcinoma of the uterine cervix. Taking into account the evolution of our knowledge and the progress of telematics in medicine, several new methods provided a potential benefit. The main ones were the following : telepathology, making distant transmission of microscope images possible, in order to require the opinion or advice of a more experienced colleague; an image data bank, illustrating typical or unusual images, as an aid to diagnosis and to teaching; computer assisted systems, able to process conventional smears and to optimize the detection of atypical cells, in order to reduce the number of false negatives. These methods are tools at the clinician's disposal- and not the contrary -bearing in mind the idea that cytodiagnosis is, and must remain, a medical labour.