Clinical-grade autonomous cytopathology through whole-slide edge tomography

Nature

by Nao Nitta

February 19, 2026

Cytopathology, often abbreviated as cytology, has a central role in the early detection of cancer, such as cervical, lung and bladder cancers, owing to its speed, simplicity and minimally invasive nature1–9. However, its effectiveness is limited by variability in diagnostic accuracy stemming from subjective visual interpretation10–21. Although many artificial intelligence (AI)-powered systems have been proposed to improve consistency22–26, none have achieved fully autonomous, clinical-grade performance. Existing approaches serve as assistive tools and still rely on human oversight for interpretation and decision-making22–26. Here we present a clinical-grade autonomous cytopathology pipeline that combines high-resolution, real-time optical whole-slide tomography with edge computing to deliver end-to-end automation. The system achieves practical performance in imaging speed, quality and data volume, with localized data compression enabling streamlined storage and accelerated AI-driven analysis. In addition to supporting cell-level classification, the platform enables flow cytometry-like, population-wide morphological profiling for comprehensive interpretation of cellular distributions and patterns. A vision transformer achieved area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) values exceeding 0.99 at the single-cell level for detecting low-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (LSILs), high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (HSILs) and adenocarcinoma. In a multicentre evaluation of 1,124 cervical liquid-based cytology samples across four centres, the AI model achieved slide-level AUC values of 0.86–0.91 for LSIL+ and 0.89–0.97 for HSIL+, with LSIL counts correlating strongly with human papillomavirus positivity and HSIL counts scaling with diagnostic severity. The system enables autonomous triage cytology, offering a foundation for routine, scalable and objective diagnostics. This study presents a clinical-grade autonomous pipeline combining high-resolution whole-slide tomography, edge computing and artificial intelligence, achieving high accuracy in cervical cytology and enabling scalable and objective diagnostics.

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Originally published on Nature on 2/19/2026