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To date, cancer of the uterine cervix is still a leading cause of cancer-related deaths in women in the world. Papanicolau smear test is a well-known screening method of detecting abnormalities in the uterine cervix cells. In Indonesia, Pap smear test is mostly still done conventionally. Due to the small number of skilled and experienced cytologists, the screening procedure becomes time consuming and highly prone to human errors. Coping with these issues, an automated recognition system is developed to enable automatic identification of anomaly in the cervix cells. Recognition of patterns inside a cervix cell is based on the cell morphological features, in terms of size, shape, and color. Therefore, three parameters are employed, i.e. N/C ratio, wavelet approximation coefficients, and color intensity. Based on thorough observation upon the selected parameters, it can be recognized that the cancerous cells follow certain patterns and highly distinguishable from the normal cells.

Bromelain, a protease enzyme, is found in the stem and fruit of pineapple. It has been used in medical as therapeutic agents and supplements, and also known to have immunomodulatory function. However, as protease, it is concerned that bromelain will affect the mammalian cells that have proteins on their surfaces. The objective of this research was to find out the effect of bromelain on mammalian cells. In order to do so, mammalian cell culture was utilized with MT -2 cells (a T cell lymphocyte) and bromelain concentrations in culture medium were 25mg/ml, 20mg/ml, 10mg/ml, 5mg/ml, and 1 mg/ml, and the evaluation of cells was using MTT assay (three MTT assays). The high concentrations resulted in inhibition more than 50%. The concentration of 5 mg/ml from second and third assay had inhibition around 50% and 1 mg/ml had no inhibition and in turn had very good viability. Therefore, this research showed that bromelain concentration of 1 mg/ml to below 5 mg/ml (specific activity 3.001 U/mg) was safe for the MT -2 cells.

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