Automatic detection of stable and unstable chromosome aberrations visualized by three-color imaging after fluorescence in situ hybridization with a painting and a pancentromeric DNA probe.

Two-color fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) in combination with digital image analysis was used to develop an automatic system for the detection and classification of chromosome aberrations. Algorithms were developed for the automatic thresholding of the three digitized images: an FITC image representing specific painted chromosomes, a TRITC image representing the centromeres of all chromosomes, and a DAPI image representing all the counterstained chromosomes. A further algorithm was developed for the automatic classification of the different types of chromosome aberrations, such as translocations, dicentrics, and fragments. For this study, a dataset of 252 metaphases were digitized and analyzed automatically as well as manually. Of these metaphases, 81.3% could be correctly classified by the algorithm. The error rate was reduced to 9.3% by automatically excluding the detected clusters and artifacts. The average analysis time per metaphase was 34.5 s without any user intervention.