Quantitative histopathology of cervical intra-epithelial neoplasia

As part of a project to evaluate emerging optical technologies for cervical neoplasia, our group is performing quantitative histo-pathological analyses of biopsy specimens from 1800 patients. The diagnostic region of interest (ROI) from immediately adjacent sections were imaged, the basal lamina and surface of the superficial layer were delimited. Non-overlapping quantitatively stained nuclei were selected from 1523 samples with histo-pathological characteristics of normal (1166), koilocytosis (140), CIN 1 (58), CIN 2 (53), and CIN 3/CIS (102). We used linear discriminant analyses to define a Morphometric score and a Macs score. Morphometric score and the clinical grade of CIN/SIL were highly correlated. We found Malignancy-Associated Changes in negative specimens from patients with different grades of histological abnormalities. Furthermore, nuclear chromatin texture changes could be detected in nuclei from High-Risk HPV specimens.