Tang Jing Rui, Mat Isa Nor Ashidi, Ch'ng Ewe Seng
Imaging and Intelligent System Research Team (ISRT), School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Nibong Tebal, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia.
Advanced Medical and Dental Institute, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Bertam, Kepala Batas, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia.
PLoS One. 2015 Nov 11;10(11):e0142830. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0142830. eCollection 2015.
Despite the effectiveness of Pap-smear test in reducing the mortality rate due to cervical cancer, the criteria of the reporting standard of the Pap-smear test are mostly qualitative in nature. This study addresses the issue on how to define the criteria in a more quantitative and definite term. A negative Pap-smear test result, i.e. negative for intraepithelial lesion or malignancy (NILM), is qualitatively defined to have evenly distributed, finely granular chromatin in the nuclei of cervical squamous cells. To quantify this chromatin pattern, this study employed Fuzzy C-Means clustering as the segmentation technique, enabling different degrees of chromatin segmentation to be performed on sample images of non-neoplastic squamous cells. From the simulation results, a model representing the chromatin distribution of non-neoplastic cervical squamous cell is constructed with the following quantitative characteristics: at the best representative sensitivity level 4 based on statistical analysis and human experts' feedbacks, a nucleus of non-neoplastic squamous cell has an average of 67 chromatins with a total area of 10.827 μm2; the average distance between the nearest chromatin pair is 0.508 μm and the average eccentricity of the chromatin is 0.47.
尽管巴氏涂片检查在降低宫颈癌死亡率方面具有有效性，但巴氏涂片检查报告标准的标准大多是定性的。本研究解决了如何以更定量和明确的术语定义标准的问题。巴氏涂片检查阴性结果，即上皮内病变或恶性肿瘤阴性（NILM），在定性上被定义为宫颈鳞状细胞核中染色质均匀分布、颗粒细小。为了量化这种染色质模式，本研究采用模糊C均值聚类作为分割技术，能够对非肿瘤性鳞状细胞的样本图像进行不同程度的染色质分割。从模拟结果中，构建了一个代表非肿瘤性宫颈鳞状细胞染色质分布的模型，具有以下定量特征：基于统计分析和专家反馈，在最佳代表性灵敏度水平4时，非肿瘤性鳞状细胞核平均有67条染色质，总面积为10.827μm²；最近染色质对之间的平均距离为0.508μm，染色质的平均偏心率为0.47。
