Analysis of the spatial arrangement of cells in the proliferative breast lesions

A particularly difficult problem in the field of histopathology is the diagnosis among epitheliosis, atypical hyperplasia and carcinoma in situ. This work is an attempt to reproduce the reasoning made by the pathologist when he/she analyzes the spatial arrangement of the cells in the duct, that is different depending on the grade of malignancy of the lesion. For this aim a method for the representation of the duct is needed, in order to identify the structures involved in the diagnosis. A representation based on perceptual graphs is derived from an initial set of nodes that represents the cell nuclei of the lesion. On this representation the evaluation and quantification of structural features may be carried out. A prototype was developed to evaluate the clinical significance of the approach. In a preliminary phase the statistical analysis of some features revealed significant differences among the three pathologies, encouraging the progression of the work. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1995.