The measuring of cell features.

The usefulness of various feature sets for discriminating between different cell populations cannot be assessed without considering the entire automated cytology system, from specimen preparation through scanning, cell search, cell segmentation, artifact rejection and feature extraction to object classification and multivariate data analysis methods. These different stages in the analysis procedure are discussed in this paper and illustrated by examples from the author's experience of cell analysis studies, ranging from single-cell classification experiments to a test of a complete automated system under realistic conditions on a set of 397 cell specimens.