Cytometry of breast carcinoma: Significance of ploïdy balance and proliferation index

Abstract

Image cytometry of DNA distribution in fine needle biopsies of breast carcinomas at first diagnosis was performed to see if there were significant differences in DNA histograms between patients having very different outcome but same tumor histological typing and similar therapy. Two groups of patients were considered retrospectively: the first (20 patients) with survival time shorter than 5 years and the second (20 patients) with survival time longer than 10 years. Seven benign tumors were used as controls. Ten ploïdy classes were defined. The frequencies of cells in those classes were used as independent features in a supervised multivariate analysis. The advantages of this approach was pointed out with respect to the four‐type classification of Auer. The scattering of DNA histograms within the feature space showed that a subgroup of patients with poor prognosis was clearly separated from a subgroup of patients with good prognosis but both long survival patients and short survival patients were scattered in between. In order to replace the multivariate classification of histograms by a simpler approach, two parameters were computed which explained most of the scattering in the feature space: the ploïdy balance (difference between the percentages of euploid and aneuploïd cells) and the proliferation index (percentage of cells between peaks). The scattergram of patients according to these parameters showed again that some DNA distributions were specific for either good or bad prognosis. But the separation was uncertain for seven short‐survival patients and six long‐survival patients. For six patients, the DNA distributions were very similar between long and short survival times. Those patients thus could not be separated even by means of discriminant analysis. The main conclusion of this study was that, for a significant number of patients, the objective multivariate classification of tumors DNA profiles is of little assistance to the pathologist who has to give a prognosis for the one patient under consideration.

Hypodiploidy, Ki-67 growth fraction and prognosis of surgically resected lung cancers

“…All lymph nodes were carefully identified according to the American Thoracic Society map of regional pulmonary nodes (Tisi et al, 1982 Computer-assisted image analysis was performed in order to quantitate the immunoperoxidase reaction (Bacus et al, 1987). The immunostaining quantitative analysis was done by means of a computer-assisted image processor (Opfermann et al, 1987) Cell DNA content analysis Tissue preparation A cytological print from each specimen was air dried. Slides were fixed in formaldehyde-alcohol solution for 10 min then washed three times in alcohol and stained by the pararosaline Feulgen-Schiff technique (Kenji, 1971).…”

Influence of smear preparation and fixatives on the DNA ploidy and the morphonuclear features of the MXT mammary tumor and normal tissues in the mouse

“…The nuclear area corresponded to the number of pixels occupied by the nucleus. The nuclear images were evaluated by eye and accepted by the observers on the same basis as those previously described (20): i.e., the nucleus corresponded to a well-preserved epithelial cell; the segmentation was satisfactory when the nuclear membrane was intact; and neither staining artefact nor overlap between different neighbouring nuclei appeared in the sample selected.…”

“…Cell image analysis of nuclei stained by the specific and stoichiometric nuclear Feulgen reaction is particularly welladapted to breast cancer diagnosis and more precisely to ploidy analysis (1, 12,20,21,23,24). Since numerous cancerous materials and their valuable clinical data are now available, retrospective morphonuclear studies on large series of cases are being made with increasing frequency.…”

Analysis of DNA and morphometry in breast carcinoma

“…However, the prognostic value of DNA parameters has been questioned (Utyerlinde et al 1989;Stanton et al 1992). A range of additional DNA histogram parameters has also been reported to yield prognostic information in breast cancer (Böcking et al 1984;Opfermann et al 1987;Stenkvist and Strande 1990).…”