Characterising the tumour morphological response to therapeutic intervention : an ex vivo model
Date
01/2013Author
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Abstract
In cancer, morphological assessment of histological tissue samples is a fundamental part of both diagnosis and prognosis. Image analysis offers opportunities to support that assessment through quantitative metrics of morphology. Generally, morphometric analysis is carried out on two-dimensional tissue section data and so only represents a small fraction of any tumour. We present a novel application of three-dimensional (3D) morphometrics for 3D imaging data obtained from tumours grown in a culture model. Minkowski functionals, a set of measures that characterise geometry and topology in n-dimensional space, are used to quantify tumour topology in the absence of and in response to therapeutic intervention. These measures are used to stratify the morphological response of tumours to therapeutic intervention. Breast tumours are characterised by estrogen receptor (ER) status, human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER) 2 status and tumour grade. Previously, we have shown that ER status is associated with tumour volume in response to tamoxifen treatment ex vivo. Here, HER2 status is found to predict the changes in morphology other than volume as a result of tamoxifen treatment ex vivo. Finally, we show the extent to which Minkowski functionals might be used to predict tumour grade. Minkowski functionals are generalisable to any 3D data set, including in vivo and cellular systems. This quantitative topological analysis can provide a valuable link among biomarkers, drug intervention and tumour morphology that is complementary to existing, non-morphological measures of tumour response to intervention and could ultimately inform patient treatment.
Citation
Savage , A , Katz , E , Eberst , A , Falconer , R E , Houston , A , Harrison , D J & Bown , J 2013 , ' Characterising the tumour morphological response to therapeutic intervention : an ex vivo model ' , Disease Models & Mechanisms , vol. 6 , no. 1 , pp. 252-260 . https://doi.org/10.1242/dmm.009886
Publication
Disease Models & Mechanisms
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1754-8403Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2012. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly cited and all further distributions of the work or adaptation are subject to the same Creative Commons License terms.
Description
This work was supported by the Northwood Trust (A.S., A.E., J.B.), the Scottish Alliance for Geoscience, Environment and Society (R.F.) and Scottish Funding Council (D.J.H.).Collections
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