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6th ESACP Congress, Heidelberg, April 7-11, 1999 |
A131
It is a well established observation among pathologists that tumour
morphology in the most invasive parts (invasive front) of a malignant
carcinoma often differs from more central and/or superficial parts of
the same tumour. At the invasive front the tumour frequently shows a
lesser degree of differentiation and a higher grade of cellular dissociation
than the remaining areas of the tumour. With emphasis on reproducibility,
simple semiquantitative malignancy grading systems have been developed
specifically for evaluation of the invasive front of carcinomas. Such a
grading system has proved to have additional prognostic value over
established prognostic factors. Reproducibility is however, still a matter
of debate. As one possible approach of increasing the reproducibility of
the classification/prognostication of this crucial area of epithelial tumour,
we have employed methods of syntactic structural analysis for the diagnosis
of epithelial lesions in the form of oral squamous cell carcinomas. These
are methods based on the mathematical models derived from graph theory as
mathematical tools for describing the texture on tissue level. We have been
able to demonstrate consistent morphological differences between normal
epithelium and tumor tissue and, moreover, to distinguish between the
profound parts of the epithelial lesions and the invasive front. However,
several shortcomings of the methods that have to be taken into consideration
when evaluating the results. These are technical problems which arise as a
result of incomplete HE-staining of the nucleus/cytoplasm in the invasive
front of some of the carcinomas and general problems related to nuclear
staining (Feulgen) on squamous cell epithelium. Segmentation algorithms
require a minimum of contrast in order to distinguish objects of interest
in a reliable manner. Cases will be presented where the problems of
automated procedures for tissue morphology assessment are discussed in
further detail.
TECHNICAL PROBLEMS RELATED TO SYNTACTICAL STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS
(CELLULAR SOCIOLOGY) IN TISSUE SECTIONS OF THE INVASIVE FRONT OF
CARCINOMS
Sudbo J, Reith A
Dept. Pathology, Section for Digital Pathology, The Norwegian Radium
Hospital, Oslo, Norway