Morphometry of normal, regenerating and cancerous hepatocytes

During the morphometric analysis of liver cell carcinomas arising in cirrhotic livers, the sizes and shapes of 2200 cancerous and 1800 regenerative hepatocytes were measured and compared to normal hepatocytes. The neoplastic population showed significantly higher polymorphism, nucleocytoplasmic ratio and the percentage of multinucleated cells, whereas the sizes of cancerous cells were the smallest. Values for regenerative cells were mainly between those of neoplastic and normal cells. The exception was constituted by the group of very large regenerative cells which met the criteria of large liver cell dysplasia (LLCD). Low nucleocytoplasmic ratio achieved by these cells is consistent with the hypothesis of regenerative character of LLCD.