Fig. 5
Cellular densities before and after debris filtering. Cellular density was compared before (raw epithelial cells/mm2) and after (filtered epithelial cells/mm2) automated debris filtering. For most cancer cases, debris filtering had a relatively small impact on cellularity while an up to 25× decrease was observed for noncancer cases. Several normal and prophylactic cases were found to have large amounts of dust, fibers, and nonspecific staining which resulted in high cellularity measurements before filtering. Automated filtering of image outlines eliminates false positives from noncellular debris on touch prep slides.