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6th ESACP Congress, Heidelberg, April 7-11, 1999 |
A091
Round low-chromatin areas (RLCA) have often been seen in the images of
nuclei stained with Feulgen-thionin method. The RLCA may represent artefacts,
nucleoli, viral infection changes or specific chromatin distribution in tumor
cell nuclei. Our study was aimed to answer the following two questions; (i)
do RLCA have any influence on the nuclear texture features and (ii) what is
the percentage of nuclei with RLCA in a sample that can influence the results
of nuclear texture features analysis. Five slides of HL60 cell line, 9 smears
of normal human vocal cords and 19 smears of breast carcinoma were taken for
image cytometry analysis. All the slides were air-dried and stained by
Feulgen-thionin method. Image analysis was performed by Cyto-Savant
(Oncometrics Imaging Corp., Vancouver, Canada). Probability density functions
of 43 nuclear texture features, matched pairs t-test and simulation model
were used for nuclear texture features analysis. Three nuclear texture
features, namely rangeßextreme, fractalßarea and runßlength, were significantly
affected in nuclei with RLCA. Previous studies showed that those three
texture features had potential diagnostic or prognostic value. The results
of simulation model indicated that mean values of those texture features
increased by more than 10% if a sample contained more than 40% of nuclei
with RLCA.
IMAGE ANALYSIS OF FEULGEN-THIONIN STAINED NUCLEI WITH ROUND LOW-CHROMATIN
AREAS (RLCA)
Lavrencak J*, Zganec M**, Us-Krasovec M*
*Institute of Oncology, Ljubljana, ** Faculty of
Electrical Engineering, Ljubljana, Slovenia