Zhao and Murphy 12 instead uses machine learning to generate the shape of the nucleus and the cytoplasm as well as the texture of the nucleus.
The digital images of nuclei of interest were stored individually and converted into a series of pixels that were quantified as the integrated optical density (IOD) value, representing the DNA content and morphological features of the cells, such as size, shape, contour, granularity and chromatin texture of the nucleus.
In application to examining cellular structure, a/LCI enables quantitative measurements of changes in the size and texture of cell nuclei.
The resources available in commercial softwares are usually restricted to basic morphometric parameters such as diameter, area and perimeter, which cannot adequately measure texture features of nuclei.
Thus, the question arises if there might exist a correlation between the nucleus texture of P63-expressed nuclei and the tumor's grade, as determined by H&E staining.
MN characteristics are rounded smooth perimeter suggestive of a membrane, less than a third the diameter of the associated nucleus, but large enough to discern shape and color; staining intensity similar to that of the nucleus; similar texture to that of nucleus; same focal plane as nucleus; and absence of overlap with, or bridge to, the nucleus.
The choice of using three nuclei as a sampling base stems from an effort to make the texture of the synthetic nuclei more general and not a scrambled copy of a single.
This indicates that the P63 stained texture of high grade nuclei has more unstructured distribution of image contrast.
However, for such an association to be investigated, a computer-based analysis of the texture of P63 stained nuclei would be required.
Considering that P63 is mainly nuclear stain, a possible correlation between the texture of P63-stained nuclei and the tumor's grade could be of value to diagnosis, since this may be related to biologic information imprinted as texture on P63 expressed nuclei.
Most probably, the loss of continuum in stained nucleus texture, due to the destruction of P63 receptors at advance histological grades, results in the formation of a multitude of microstructures of various sizes and, thus, in a nucleus texture of increased inhomogeneous appearance and loss of image linearity.
