DIGITAL CELL IMAGE-ANALYSIS OF FEULGEN-STAINED NUCLEI FROM HUMAN PAPILLARY, MEDULLARY, COLLOID, LOBULAR AND COMEDOCARCINOMAS OF THE BREAST

The morphonuclear characteristics (nuclear size and chromatin pattern) , the proliferation index and the ploidy level were characterized in a series of 46 breast tumors including medullary (5 cases), papillary ( 6 cases), lobular (27 cases), colloid (4 cases) and comedo- (4 cases) carcinomas. The quantitative assessments were carried out by means of digital cell image analyses of Feulgen stained nuclei from imprint sme ars. The results show that monovariate analyses (one-way variance anal yses) were much less potent than multivariate analyses (principal comp onents analyses followed by the canonical transformation of the data a nd discriminant analyses) in assessing the molphonuclear characteristi cs of these breast tumors. The multivariate analyses indicated that th ere might be a level of malignancy which increases according to the se quence papillary and medullary and colloid carcinomas --> comedocarcin omas --> lobular carcinomas. This assertion is corroborated by the plo idy-level-related results which revealed a higher proportion of highly aneuploid cases in the group of lobular carcinomas than in the group which included medullary, papillary and colloid carcinomas. However, s ince highly aneuploid cases were also encountered in this latter low m alignancy level gr oup, we expressed the hypothesis firstly that aneup loidy reflects two dinstict biological properties, i.e. the aggressive ness of a tumor and its age, and secondly that a highly aneuploid but low malignancy tumor should correspond to old degenerating tumors.