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

A064
CORRELATION OF PATHOLOGY, LOSS OF HETEROZYGOTY, MORPHOMETRY AND ARCHITECTURE INDICES IN BRONCHIAL DYSPLASTIC LESIONS
Guillaud M 1, Lam S 1, Klein-Parker H 1, Gazdar A 2, Payne P 1, Leriche J 3, Dawe Ch 1, Korbelic J 1, Palcic B 1, Macaulay CE 1

1) Cancer Imaging Department, British Columbia Cancer Agency, Vancouver, Canada, 2) University of Texas, Southewestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas, USA 3) Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, British Columbia Cancer Agency, Canada

Given the demography of current and ex-smoking populations in North America, lung cancer will be a major problem in the forseeable future. Early detection and treatment of lung cancer holds great promise for the management of this disease. A number of chemo-prevention studies are being conducted in our laboratories to investigate the protective effect of agents such as retinol. One method of monitoring chemo-preventive agents is through histological evaluation. However intra-and inter-observer variability introduces significant error. We investigated quantitative analysis of more than 1500 pre-inavsive neoplastic bronchial biopsies. Using an interactive version of the Cyto-savant (Oncometric Imaging Corp.) cytometric and tissue architectural data were collected from these biopsies. The Loss of Heterozygosity (LOH) at ten sites commonly associated with cancer was analyzed and a LOH index was calculated for ~400 biopsies. Using data from the normal and cancer groups in one hand, and data from biopsies without LOH and biopsies with high Frequency of Regional Loss (FRL) in an other hand, quantitative morphometric and architectural indices were generated and calculated for all collected biopsies. These quantitative indices will be compared and correlated with the pathology grade and the FRL index. Potential use of image cytometry as intermediate endpoint biomarker for lung cancer chemoprevention will be discussed.