An optoelectronic system has been designed to pre-screen pap-smear slides and detect the suspicious cells using the hit/miss transform. Computer simulation of the algorithm tested on 184 pap-smear images detected 95% of the suspicious region as suspect while tagging just 5 % of the normal regions as suspect. An optoelectronic implementation of the hit/miss transform using a 4f Vander-Lugt correlator architecture is proposed and demonstrated with experimental results.