APPLICATION OF CONFOCAL SCANNING LASER MICROSCOPY FOR AN AUTOMATED NUCLEAR GRADING OF PROSTATE LESIONS IN 3 DIMENSIONS

Confocal scanning laser microscopy provides the opportunity to obtain three-dimensional (3-D) images by piling up consecutive confocal plane s. This technique was applied to capture 3-D images from 100O-mu m-thi ck tissue blocks from prostate lesions (hyperplasia, dysplasia, adenoc arcinomas), Automated methods were implemented to perform a nuclear gr ading of 3-D cell nuclei from these specimens. Special attention was f ocused on the development of a new approach to 3-D chromatin texture a nalysis, This method uses mathematical morphology operations to tessel late the chromatin into homogeneous domains. The nuclear features (vol ume, shape, texture) were subjected to a discriminant analysis. Using a set of five features, the classification of cell nuclei yielded an a ccuracy of 96.3%. The results indicate the potential of 3-D imaging an d analysis techniques for an automated nuclear grading of prostate les ions.