Classification of cells in vaginal smears with television microscopy.

Properties of 924 cells were measured using a television microscope. A program was written using measured properties discriminating between normal and malignant cells. An investigation of the number of free-lying whole cells and free-lying nuclei on a malignant smear is presented. It is shown that it is possible to get a rather accurate discrimination for single cells using television microscopy with only 10 grey-levels and measuring only density of nucleus, cytoplasm and size of nucleus. However, if classification of single cells should be applied to classify an entire smear, the accuracy in the classification of the single cells must be very high.