A carefully concrolled double-blind study of the usefulness of a new device as an aid in screening for cervical cancer was carried out. The device measures and displays multiple spectrophotometric properties of cells in liquid suspension a t rapid rates. T h e results of a test involving cervical swab and vaginal wash specimens from 1155 patients are presented. Cytologic smears, obtained concurrently with samples for the device and processed by the Papanicolaou technique, were independently evaluated. Biopsy results on those patients considered by cytology to have cancer were used in evaluating the device. Forty-five per cent of the swab samples were readable by the device; of these i t selected 3596, which included 85% of the readable cases with cancer. With vaginal wash samples 50% of the known cancers were missed. These results reflect the efficiency of the cell sampling procedure as well as the performance of the device itself; inefficient sampling procedures account for the low percentage of readable swab samples and for some of the cases that were missed with these samples, as well as the poor results obtained with the vaginal wash samples.
N 1965 KAMENTSKY ET A L . ~ REPORTED A NEW I device for measuring and displaying multiple spectrophotometric properties of cells in liquid suspension at rates exceeding 500 cells/sec. Cathode-ray display patterns were obtained in which each cell of a large population (-105 cells) was represented by a dot with ordinate proportional to the absorption at 2537 A (near the nucleic acid absorption peak) and abscissa proportional to the scat-