Image cytometry in malignancy grading of breast cancer. Results in a prospective study with seven years of follow-up.

A fully automated system for image cytometry is presented. In combination with a special tumor sampling procedure, the system proved able to record with high reproducibility a large number of tumor cell population descriptors of high prognostic significance in a prospective study of breast cancer. These included the degree of abnormality of DNA distribution (strongly correlated with the proliferative rate) and some descriptors of shape and texture (strongly correlated with the grading system for breast cancer suggested by the World Health Organization). While the extreme complexity of a true malignancy grading system for breast cancer is underlined, the results of this study indicate that its creation is a possibility, given sufficient effort by interdisciplinary teams using modern sophisticated analytical techniques.