The significance of morphometric methods in cytologic diagnostics: differentiation between mesothelial cells, mesothelioma cells and metastatic adenocarcinoma cells in pleural effusions with special emphasis on chromatin texture.

Opinions differ widely as to the value of morphometric techniques for differentiating between mesothelial cells, mesothelioma cells and metastatic adenocarcinoma cells in pleural effusions. The significance of the changes in the chromatin structure to differentiate between these three cell types was stressed by various scientific groups only qualitatively, and until now no group has used digital methods to quantify chromatin structures. The controversy about the value of morphometric methods was the reason for conducting the following study. We wanted to investigate (i) the importance of various planimetric and texture parameters as well as invariant moments as morphometric discriminators; and (ii) to set up a data structure to make possible the further diagnostic use of the multivariate morphometric analyses method for other applications. The present findings show that nuclear size and form are not the decisive factors in differentiating between reactive cells and mesothelioma cells, but pixel related texture parameters and invariant moments are. All parameter types used showed differences between reactive cells and cells of adenocarcinoma metastases. Invariant moments and shape descriptors, but not texture parameters are used to discriminate between mesothelioma cells and cells of adenocarcinoma metastases.