Image analysis of mesothelioma. I. differentiation of mesothelioma from adenocarcinoma of the lung.

Objective: To explore the usefulness of nuclear micromorphometric analysis for the differentiation between epithelial mesothelioma and metastatic adenocarcinoma in the chest wall.

Study Design: High-resolution images of 2,100 nuclei from 27 cases of epithelial mesothelioma and 15 cases of adenocarcinoma of the lung were recorded. Stepwise discriminant analysis and a nonparametric classifier were applied to derive estimates for a case diagnosis correct classification rate.