One technique being developed at the Univ. In building an optical correlator system to perform this task, researchers have found that designing the appropriate optical filters is more complicated than expected.
Cervical cancer is the leading cause of mortality in the developing world.
Unfortunately, though somewhat successful, annual screening programs in countries like the U.S. and UK. often miss these signs because the likelihood of finding a problem cell is so small. On average, less than 5 percent of sample slides would be classified as abnormal, and less than 10 percent of the cells on these slides are themselves irregular. Because of this, up to 30 percent of unhealthy or suspicious samples are misidentified as normal by technicians. The idea being pursued by the Univ. 1,2 is to use the parallelism of optics to classify the cells on an entire slide simultaneously, but in a relatively unsophisticated way.