Microscopic morphometry--a modern approach.

TL;DR: The computer-aided morphometric investigations open perspectives for operating with more expressive criteria in pathology diagnosis, resulting from the possibility to quantify, at the pixel level, features of interest which in classical approaches are subject to rough approximations.

Abstract: OBJECTIVES The aim of this paper is to give a brief presentation of the recent trends in histologic and histopathologic computerized morphometry, based on the personal experience in exploiting modern software environments and illustrated by a relevant case study. Through its goal, overall conception and direct involvement in diagnosis, the work belongs to the currently emerging researches on analytical and quantitative histology. MATERIAL AND METHODS The proposed methodology for the automatic extraction of quantitative features is applied to an endometrial adenocarcinoma and is implemented as a procedure, called ADK, running on ZeissKS400 platform. The description of the ADK procedure, as a detailed flowchart, is preceded by an overview of the KS400 resources for biomedical domain, compared to the main characteristics of other three well-known software packages for digital image processing. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS The results are formulated in terms of the numerical information provided by the exploitation of ADK procedure, referring to the 2-D and 3-D (stereological) evaluation of tumorous versus stromal areas and volumes, respectively. Procedure ADK also performed measurements for the nuclei corresponding to the stromal and tumorous zones, respectively, in order to calculate the percentage of nuclei inside these zones. The discussions focus on the interpretation of the measurement results, as factors for the prognostic assessment. CONCLUSIONS The computer-aided morphometric investigations open perspectives for operating with more expressive criteria in pathology diagnosis, resulting from the possibility to quantify, at the pixel level, features of interest which in classical approaches are subject to rough approximations.