Figure 1.

The schematic summarizes the timeline of the development of cervical cancer detection. The study of vaginal smears began in the 1920s, followed by the cytologic identification of neoplastic lesions using iodine solution (1930s) and the Papanicolaou stain (1941). After the discovery of the causal link between HPV infection and cervical cancer in 1985, HPV nucleic acid tests were included as a standard diagnostic test in the laboratory. In recent years, the artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted detection platform has become popular [21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33].