Nuclear chromatin texture analysis of nonmalignant tissue can detect adjacent prostatic adenocarcinoma

BACKGROUND. The aim of this study was to investigate the possibility of ide ntifying prostatic adenocarcinoma by nuclear chromatin texture feature anal ysis of adjacent histologically benign-looking tissue. METHODS. Two hundred and forty prostatectomy specimens were selected from t he archives of the Department of Pathology, University of Innsbruck. These consisted of 67 cases of benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and 173 cases o f prostatic adenocarcinoma (PAC). The specimen collection was divided rando mly into a training set and test set. Cytospin preparations of disaggregate d cells prepared from paraffin-embedded material were stained specifically for DNA by the Feulgen method. For the cancer cases, only tissue that histo logically appeared nonmalignant, from the vicinity of the lesion, was used in the sample preparation Only normal-appearing diploid cell nuclei were an alyzed from both the BPH and PAC groups. A discriminator comprised of three nuclear texture features to separate BPH from PAC cases was derived from t he training set of cases, and then applied to the independent test set case s. RESULTS. PAC cases were separated from BPH cases with a sensitivity of 90% and a specificity of 97% on the independent test set of cases. CONCLUSIONS. This retrospective investigation demonstrates that by high-res olution image cytometry it is possible to detect the presence of prostatic adenocarcinoma with very high reliability when examining prostate samples t hat only contain histologically normal-looking cells. This method could bec ome clinically relevant in identification of cancers missed by histological ly negative core needle biopsies. Prostate 41:12-19, 1999. (C) 1999 Wiley-L iss, Inc.