Oncometrics Imaging Corporation and Xillix Technologies Corporation. Use of the Cyto-Savant in quantitative cytology

Large-scale DNA organization is a prognostic marker of breast cancer survival

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women worldwide. We investigated whether changes in large-scale DNA organization (LDO) of tumor epithelial nuclei are an indicator of the aggressiveness of the tumor. We tested our algorithm on a set of 172 duplicates TMA cores samples coming from 95 breast cancer patients. Thirty-five patients died of breast cancer, and 60 were still alive 10 years after surgery. Duplicates cores were used to create training and test set. The TMA slides were stained with Feulgen-thionin and imaged using our in-house high-resolution Imaging system. Automated segmentation of cell nuclei followed by manual selection of intact, in-focus nuclei resulted in an average of 50 cell nuclei per sample available for analysis. Using forward stepwise linear discriminant analysis, a combination of six features that combined linearly gave the best discrimination between the two groups of cells: cells collected from 'deceased' patients TMA specimens and cells collected from "survivors" patients TMA specimens. Five of these features measure the spatial organization of DNA chromatin. The resulting canonical score is named cell LDO score. A patient LDO score, percentage of cell nuclei with a cell LDO score higher than a predefined cutoff value, was processed for the specimens in the test set, and a cutoff value was defined to classify patients with a low or a high LDO score. Using this binary test, 82.1% of patients were correctly classified are "deceased" or "survivors," with a specificity of 79% and a sensitivity of 88%. The relative risk of death of an individual with a high LDO score was nine times higher than for a patient with a low LDO score. When testing the combination of LDO score, node status, histological grade, and tumor grade to predict breast cancer survival, LDO was the most significant predictor. LDO classification was also highly associated with survival for only grade 1 and 2 patients as well as for only grade 3 patients. Our result confirms the potential of LDO to measure phenotypic changes associated with more aggressive disease and could be evaluated to identify patients more likely to benefit from adjuvant therapies.

High throughput image cytometry for detection of suspicious lesions in the oral cavity

The successful management of oral cancer depends upon early detection, which relies heavily on the clinician's ability to discriminate sometimes subtle alterations of the infrequent premalignant lesions from the more common reactive and inflammatory conditions in the oral mucosa. Even among experienced oral specialists this can be challenging, particularly when using new wide field-of-view direct fluorescence visualization devices clinically introduced for the recognition of at-risk tissue. The objective of this study is to examine if quantitative cytometric analysis of oral brushing samples could facilitate the assessment of the risk of visually ambiguous lesions. About 369 cytological samples were collected and analyzed: (1) 148 samples from pathology-proven sites of SCC, carcinoma in situ or severe dysplasia; (2) 77 samples from sites with inflammation, infection, or trauma, and (3) 144 samples from normal sites. These were randomly separated into training and test sets. The best algorithm correctly recognized 92.5% of the normal samples, 89.4% of the abnormal samples, 86.2% of the confounders in the training set as well as 100% of the normal samples, and 94.4% of the abnormal samples in the test set. These data suggest that quantitative cytology could reduce by more than 85% the number of visually suspect lesions requiring further assessment by biopsy.

DNA ploidy compared with human papilloma virus testing (Hybrid Capture II) and conventional cervical cytology as a primary screening test for cervical high-grade lesions and cancer in 1555 patients with biopsy confirmation

BACKGROUND

Because 80% of cervical cancers arise in low-resource settings, many inexpensive strategies are being tested. In that spirit, the authors are testing large-scale genomic or DNA ploidy measurements as an inexpensive and semiautomated strategy.

METHODS

Patients entered either a screening or diagnostic study of several optical technologies: quantitative cytology, quantitative histopathology, and fluorescence and reflectance spectroscopy using a point probe, a multispectral digital colposcope, or a combination of the two. We calculated sensitivities, specificities, positive and negative predictive values, and their confidence interval testing conventional cytology, Hybrid Capture (HC) II testing, and DNA ploidy measured on the Feulgen-stained quantitative Pap smear.

RESULTS

The current investigation reports on 1555 patients for whom colposcopically directed biopsies were read 3 times by study pathologists. The final histopathologic diagnosis was high grade (cervical intraepithelial neoplasia [CIN] 2, CIN 3, carcinoma in situ [CIS], and cancer) in 16% of patients. Using high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (SILs) histopathology as the threshold and gold standard, the sensitivity and specificity, respectively, were: 0.47 and 0.96 for conventional cytology, 0.91 and 0.80 for HC II, and 0.59 and 0.93 for DNA ploidy. The positive and negative predictive values (PPV, NPV) for conventional cytology were 0.70 and 0.90, 0.46 and 0.98 for HC II, and 0.63 and 0.92 for DNA ploidy.

CONCLUSIONS

DNA ploidy shows comparable sensitivity, specificity, PPV, and NPV values to conventional cytology and HC II. Unlike conventional cytology, DNA ploidy is semiautomated and can be performed in less than 8 hours. Cost effectiveness studies are under way, but in the authors' laboratory DNA ploidy is inexpensive.

Increase of sensitivity of sputum cytology using high-resolution image cytometry: field study results

Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer deaths in the developed world. There is no widely accepted method to screen for this cancer. The most commonly used method remains conventional sputum cytology, but this method is hampered by low sensitivity. We tested the hypothesis that sensitivity of sputum cytology for early lung cancer can be greatly improved by using image analysis of sputum cells, at a modest reduction of specificity. The study was double-blinded and used sputum samples from subjects with well-characterized clinical diagnoses. There were 177 cancers, 98 dysplasias, and 558 normals. The study samples were separated into two independent sets: training set and test set. Sputum samples were collected prospectively from subjects with a high probability of having lung cancer. Seven institutions from five countries participated in the study. All subjects had complete clinical diagnoses which included, as a minimum, negative chest x-rays for all negative cancers, while all cancers had confirmed tissue pathology. Samples were prepared according to the Saccomanno method. For conventional cytology, slides were stained using Papanicolaou stain. For image analysis, slides were stained using a DNA-specific (Feulgen-Thionin) stain. An automated, high-resolution image cytometer was used for measurements. At 90% specificity, sensitivity of 60% can be achieved for adenocarcinoma, compared to only 14% sensitivity of conventional cytology (at 99% specificity). Similarly, 45% sensitivity at 90% specificity can be reached for stages 0 and I lung cancer, compared to only 14% (at 99% specificity) using conventional cytology.Cytometry combined with conventional cytology shows an increase in sensitivity to early-stage cancer and to adenocarcinomas compared to conventional cytology alone. While the results are encouraging, the sensitivity to detect early lung cancer should be further improved to 70-80% at 90-95% specificity before this test can be considered for screening of high-risk individuals for lung cancer. Cytometry (Clin. Cytometry) 50:168-176, 2002.

Diagnosis of roentgenographically occult lung cancer by sputum cytology

The specialty has the knowledge and technology to change the outcome of lung cancer. Lung cancer, diagnosed in early stages, is as curable as all other cancers. Sputum cytology is the initial step in diagnosing roentgenographically occult lung cancer. Sputum cytology is complementary to CT scanning. Sputum cytology identifies small central lesions, and CT scanning discovers peripheral tiny adenocarcinomas.

PCR based high risk HPV testing is superior to neural network based screening for predicting incident CIN III in women with normal cytology and borderline changes

BACKGROUND/AIMS

To improve the accuracy of conventional cytology in cervical cancer screening, high risk human papillomavirus (HPV) testing and neural network based screening have been developed. This study assessed the power of both techniques to detect women at risk of developing incident CIN III; that is, CIN III detected during the follow up of women with normal cytology and borderline nuclear changes.

METHODS

A cohort of 2250 women, 34-54 years of age, who attended population based cervical cancer screening from 1988 to 1991 and had normal smears or borderline nuclear changes was followed. All smears were tested for high risk HPV and the smears were rescreened using neural network based screening. The value of neural network based screening for predicting incident CIN III during a mean follow up period of 6.4 years was compared with that of high risk HPV testing. In addition, morphological markers presumed to be related to HPV were correlated with HPV status.

RESULTS

Thirteen (0.6%) women had incident CIN III. Both high risk HPV positivity and abnormal cytology were associated with an increased risk for incident CIN III (odds ratio, 240 and 22, respectively) and high risk HPV positivity was associated with abnormal cytology. The sensitivity of high risk HPV testing for predicting incident CIN III was much higher than that of neural network based screening (92% and 46%, respectively). None of the morphological markers assessed, including koilocytosis, was correlated with high risk HPV status.

CONCLUSION

High risk HPV testing is superior to neural network based screening in identifying women at risk of developing CIN III. For women with normal cytology and borderline changes and a negative high risk HPV test, the screening interval can be considerably prolonged.