DNA ploidy analysis by laser scanning cytometry (LSC) in colorectal cancers and comparison with flow cytometry

We evaluated laser scanning cytometry (LSC) by comparing nuclear DNA ploidy determined by LSC and by flow cytometry (FCM) in 77 samples of human colorectal cancer from 48 patients. Both methods revealed an aneuploid peak in 30 (62.5%) of the cases, although two samples that were aneuploid by LSC were diploid by FCM and two others were diploid by LSC and aneuploid by FCM. The concordance rate for nuclear DNA ploidy was 91.7% in the 48 patients and 87.0% for the 77 samples. The DNA index was also highly correlated between two methods (r2 = 0.97, P < 0.001). We concluded that LSC provides DNA histograms equivalent to FCM for surgical specimens and has potential clinical application in pathology.