Analysis of Survivin protein expression in our study of paediatric ependymal and CP tumours showed that Survivin is expressed in all morphologic grades of these tumours.
Our study does support a potential use for the sc-10811 antibody in determining or helping to confirm the morphologic grades of ependymomas and choroidal tumours, as these particular brain tumours are notoriously difficult to grade on the basis of histology alone (Burger, 1994).
Therefore, tissue microarrays were constructed from a series of pure DCISs, a large set of markers were used for IHC, and unsupervised hierarchical cluster analysis was performed to evaluate results; clustering was correlated with morphologic grade of DCIS as assessed on whole tumour slides.
The results of these studies suggest that control subjects have a similar prevalence of morphologic abnormalities as those at risk for OA and those with mild/moderate OA; thus, the use of morphologic grading to discriminate between subjects with early OA and controls may be challenging.
Morphologic grading was recorded as described previously (18).
Interobserver variation in gross morphologic grading was verified by measuring agreement with the κ statistic.
This pattern of expression supports the hypothesis that Survivin plays a functional role in normal ependymal growth and/or neural stem cell differentiation, and that abnormally low levels of expression of the nuclear form of this protein may be a marker of disease aggression and/or morphologic grade in ependymal and CP tumours.
In addition to size, it is possible that other poorly documented factors (e.g. local invasiveness, proliferation rate, or morphologic grade) also impact on the risk of local relapse, and are confounding factors in a dose-response analysis.
The disappearance of the keratin immunostaining in ballooned hepatocytes is reasonably specific for ASH and NASH, since it is not seen in ballooned cells of viral hepatitis or toxic damage and can therefore be used as an objective morphologic parameter in grading of steatohepatitis (Lackner et al. 2008).
The inclusion of eyes with advanced stages of severe uveitis presented a challenge to reading center grading of morphologic characteristics.
