6th ESACP Congress, Heidelberg, April 7-11, 1999

A051
MALIGNANCY ASSOCIATED CHANGES: A NEW DIAGNOSTIC TOOL IN EARLY LARYNGEAL CANCER DETECTION?
Dreyer Th 1, Garner D 3, Doudkine A 3, Knoblauch I 1, Popella Ch 2

1) Institute of Pathology and 2) Department of Otorhinolaryngology of the Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Germany; 3) BC Cancer Research Centre, Vancouver, Canada

Malignancy Associated Changes represent nuclear texture alterations found at the vicinity of many cancers, which can only be observed by high resolution image analysis. Recently, we demonstrated MAC feature expression at the vicinity of laryngeal cancer. The aim of this study was to confirm this finding at a larger sample set and to correlate this feature to the inflammatory response of the stroma. This study comprises histological sections of benign laryngeal epithelium with (n=20) and without lymphocytic infiltrate (n=20) as well as benign appearing epithelium at the vicinity of laryngeal cancer with (n=21) and without lymphocytic stromal infiltrate (n=21). Typically 150 Feulgen Thionin stained cell nuclei of the epithelium of each specimen were scanned by a Cyto Savant image analyzer (Oncometrics, VancouverBC). The most important result was that nuclear texture features indicating nearby cancer were only detected in the presence of lymphocytic stromal infiltrate. Cell by cell classification accuracy was 69%. The benign control samples indicated that this phenomenon could not be explained by non specific inflammatory conditions or healing effects of the epithelium. From these data we conclude that lymphocytes play a key role in MAC feature expression by carrying a specific signal to benign epithelial cells at the vicinity of cancer.