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Updated: Jun 20, 2026
Optimization of a Multiplex RNA-based Expression Assay Using Breast Cancer Archival Material
Published on: August 1, 2018
Computer-based association of the texture of expressed estrogen receptor nuclei with histologic grade using
Spiros Kostopoulos1, Dimitris Glotsos, Dionisis Cavouras
1Medical Image Processing and Analysis Group, Laboratory of Medical Physics, School of Medicine, University of Patras, Athens, Greece. skostopoulos@upatras.gr
Objective:
To investigate the potential correlation between estrogen receptor (ER) texture and histologic grade in breast carcinomas.
Study Design:
Clinical material comprised 96 biopsies of infiltrative ductal carcinomas that were hematoxylin-eosin (H-E) and immunohistochemically (IHC) stained. H-E-stained specimens were used for tumor grading, and IHC-stained specimens were analyzed for ER-status estimation. Spearman's correlation test was used to estimate the relation between histologic grade and both the physician's ER-status assessment and a computer system's ER-status evaluation. Moreover, a pattern recognition system was developed that takes as input textural features extracted from ER-expressed nuclei and outputs the grade of the tumor. The system was evaluated using an external cross-validation procedure in order to assess its generalization to new cases.
Results:
Spearman's correlation revealed that the histologic grading was inversely related to both the physician's ER-status assessment and to the computer system's ER-status evaluation. The pattern recognition system was able to predict histologic grade with 95.2% accuracy. Important textural nuclear features were proven--the skewness, the angular second moment and the sum of entropy.
Conclusion:
ER-expressed nuclei texture was found to contain important information related to histologic grade.
