A practical graphical method for estimating the fraction of cells in S in DNA histograms from clinical tumor samples containing aneuploid cell populations

A graphical method for the analysis of unperturbed DNA histograms is presented in which the area of the normalized histogram subtended by the fraction of cells in S is represented by a trapezoid whose dimensions are dependent on features common to all such histograms. The technique takes measurement variability into account. This method was applied to a variety of synthetic DNA histograms. Overall, calculated values for the fraction of cells in S correlated well with actual values. This method was applied to 36 diploid cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma; results correlated well with those obtained by a computer-based method. The results of the graphical-method were also highly reproducible between different observers. The graphical method can be used in the presence of aneuploid cell populations. Techniques for calculating S fractions in the presence of aneuploidy in clinical samples are described. These techniques were applied to synthetic histograms of mixed diploid and aneuploid populations. Calculated values correlated well with actual values.