Objective: The topology of proliferating cells in tissue sections of breast cancers was studied as the static expression of the cellular sociology of distinct subpopulations of tumor cells. With the terms neighborhood and connectivity, an attempt was made to describe the mutual interrelations of cycling tumor cells objectively in different prognostic subgroups of invasive ductal breast carcinomas.
Study design: For these studies the spatial distribution of Ki-67 (Mib1)-positive tumor cells was investigated by means of Voronoi tesselation, minimum spanning tree techniques, cluster analysis and second-order stereology in a series of 80 breast tumors. Thirty-nine basic features were used for describing the topology of tumor cells with different degrees of Mib-1 reactivity.
Results: Multivariate analyses demonstrated different proliferation patterns associated with tumor size, nodal status, histopathologic grade, DNA ploidy and flow cytometric proliferation variables.
Conclusion: Independent of the spatial organization of the tumor cells, their tissue pattern of proliferation activity correlated with the tumor properties.