Morphologic evaluation of radiotherapy in cervical carcinoma--a computerized morphometric approach

Abstract

Our work analyses the effects of radiotherapy in cervical carcinoma by computerized morphometry techniques that evaluate the morphologic changes in the specimens taken from pre and post-irradiation biopsies of 8 cases. These cases were diagnosed as squamous cell carcinoma, undifferentiated (1 case), moderately (5 cases) and well differentiated (2 cases). For each case, 40 relevant microscopic fields were chosen, reflecting the morphologic aspects before (20 fields) and after irradiation (20 fields). The digitised images of these fields were used for measuring the tumoral and stromal areas by a program we implemented in the Zeiss KS400 environment. The program provides a mean tumoral/stromal area for each case, computed by averaging the results of the 20 measurements performed on the pre and post-irradiation images. In terms of a stereological interpretation, each mean tumoral area expresses the percentage of the tumoral volume and can be used as an index for quantifying the efficiency of the radiotherapy. Such an index allows developing comparative discussions on cases that belong either to the same diagnosis entity, or to different diagnosis entities. These discussions yield the idea that the morphologic classification of a case is not sufficient to accurately predict the efficiency of irradiation, and a systematic approach to the morphometric features, before and after irradiation, may contribute to the refinement of the prediction.