Usefulness of morphometric evaluation of histopathologic slides in predicting long-term outcome of patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the lung. A preliminary report.

The present work was designed to evaluate the role of morphometric parameters in contributing to establish prognosis in 35 patients who underwent surgical resection of squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) of the lung. Morphometric studies were performed by means of point counting techniques. Patients considered as disease-free survivors, ie, those without tumor recurrence for more than 60 months (n = 6), were designated as DOWELL, whereas the remaining 29 patients comprised the DOBAD group. In order to characterize DOWELL patients, multivariate models combining numeric and categoric variables were constructed considering numeric variables (age and morphometric parameters) or indexes for categoric data such as stage, and presence of residual tumor. Staging, incomplete tumor resection, and nucleus-cytoplasm ratio were selected by the model as significantly associated with survival. In addition, nuclear volume contributed (although nonsignificantly per se) to further refine the model by increasing its r value. Our results indicate that histopathologic data, when evaluated quantitatively, could predict prognosis in patients with SCC, together with staging and clinical data and encourage the use of morphometric procedures in the histopathologic analysis of SCC.