Quantitative features of chromatin structure in the prognosis of breast cancer

✍ Scribed by Dymitr Komitowski; Catherine Janson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1990
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 637 KB
• Volume: 65
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0008-543X
• DOI: 10.1002/1097-0142(19900615)65:12<2725::aid-cncr2820651221>3.0.co;2-u

✦ Synopsis

In prognosis of breast cancer different parameters are in current use. Along with clinical staging the most important parameter appears to be histologic grading. Features of the grading such as nuclear pleomorphism proved to correlate closely with the proliferative activity and aggressiveness of the tumors. Because of difficulties in assessing and classifying the degree of nuclear pleomorphism by usual microscopy, the authors applied methods of digital image analysis. The study is a retrospective analysis of paraffine slides from the primary lesions of 60 breast cancers with 10 to 16 years of follow-up evaluation. Using large sets of different parameters defining nuclear morphology and chromatin structure the authors extracted criteria with prognostic importance. These included nuclear area in pm2, eccentricity, integral optical density per pm', average area of a chromatin region, integral optical density of a chromatin region per pm', and the number of central chromatin regions per pm'. The results demonstrate that the criteria used enable prediction of prognosis with an accuracy of 92%.