Morphometric analysis of nuclei in epithelial structures from normal and neoplastic endometrium: a study using the...

Morphometric analysis of nuclear area and shape in epithelial cells from cytological specimens from 35 patients with normal endometrium and from 20 patients with moderately or well differentiated endometrial adenocarcinoma was performed. The mean nuclear area in malignant cells was significantly higher than in normal epithelial cells. The range of the mean values from the normal cases, however, included 70% of the malignant values. Furthermore, individual cell groups in a normal cell population often gave values well within the malignant range. The greatest distinction between normal and malignant cases was obtained using a cut off mean value of 45 micron 2. With this as the sole criterion 17% of reports would have been false positives and 25% false negatives.