Chromatin texture of melanocytic nuclei: correlation between light and electron microscopy

Cells of a benign pigmented mole and a malignant melanoma were used to compare electron microscopy (EM) and light microscopy (LM) with high-resolution TV-scanning and multivariate analysis methods. Special emphasis was placed on different kinds of chromatin texture features and their discriminating power. Comparative studies on EM and LM are useful to look for the reliability of light microscopic features for the recognition of malignant melanoma cells. Identical cells of benign pigmented moles and malignant melanomas could be scanned by both EM and LM techniques. As a result, there is a significant correlation between EM and LM texture features, derived from the co-occurrence matrix and the difference statistics histogram. This helps to demonstrate that classification in LM is sufficiently good using texture features only.