Nuclear morphometric features in benign breast tissue and risk of subsequent breast cancer

Abstract

Certain nuclear morphometric features measured in breast tumor tissue have been shown to predict the prognosis of breast cancer patients. However, the application of these features to predicting risk of breast cancer development has received little attention. We conducted a case-control study to evaluate nuclear morphometric features in benign breast tissue in association with subsequent breast cancer risk. The study was nested within a cohort of 4,888 women with a histopathologic diagnosis of benign breast disease (BBD) and involved 61 cases and 71 controls, amongst whom there were 53 matched case-control sets. Conditional logistic regression models were fitted to assess various measurements of nuclear size and nuclear shape factors in relation to subsequent breast cancer risk. In multivariate analysis, subsequent breast cancer risk was positively associated with a nuclear shape factor that takes the shortest nuclear axis and the longest nuclear axis into consideration simultaneously (highest quartile versus lowest 3 quartiles: odds ratio = 3.07, 95% confidence limits = 1.61, 5.84). In contrast, there was no alteration in subsequent breast cancer risk in association with nuclear size features and other shape factors.In conclusion, our study results suggest that the shape factor that takes both the shortest nuclear axis and the longest nuclear axis into consideration might be of value to predict subsequent development of breast cancer among women with BBD.

Prognostic value of automatically extracted nuclear morphometric features in whole slide images of male breast cancer

“…These results are in agreement with multiple studies that have shown the prognostic significance of nuclear morphometry in female and male breast cancer patients. [2][3][4][5][6][7][8] Altogether, this suggest that prognostication in male breast cancer could benefit from replacing classical nuclear atypia scoring according to the Bloom and Richardson grading system by automated nuclear morphometry of whole slide images.…”

“…The usefulness of nuclear morphometry by image analysis in providing more objective and reproducible prognosis for breast cancer patients has been recognized for a long time. [2][3][4][5][6][7][8] Prognostically important features express the nuclear size and shape (and in some cases the nuclear texture and the architecture of the tissue 9 ) in a quantitative manner. Incorporating nuclear morphometry features into grading would therefore make sense, but wider acceptance of such an approach to histological grading has been hampered by the tedious and time consuming nature of the manual segmentation of nuclei.…”

Evaluation of Pre-Malignant and Malignant Lesions in Cervico Vaginal ( P AP ) Smears by Nuclear Morphometry

“…Some of the breast studies have also measured long axis and short axis as nuclear morphometric parameters, but among the nuclear parameters nuclear area and perimeter are important [17][18][19].…”

Microsurgical and histomorphometric study of the occipital sinus: Quantitative measurements using a novel approach of stereology

“…A smaller aspect ratio indicates a flatter contour. Definition of particle shape is a long-standing problem and there is no standard definition (Carter and Yan, 2005;Cui et al, 2007). The formula of shape factor (SF) used in this study's imaging based system is defined as:…”