Blinded Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization Interpretation by Traditional Microscopy and Digital Image Capture Methods

Abstract

The study aimed to compare two signal interpretation methods for identification of chromosomal abnormalities in patients. The methods used were traditional microscopy (TM) and digital image capture (DI) regarding fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) for detection of chromosomal abnormalities in cancerous cells. This research was a retrospective analytic, blinded study. The data were selected from cancer cases that were submitted to the Institute of Pathology (IOP), Ministry of Public Health, Thailand, in 2016. Totally, there were 40 cases used in the study, which can be separated into 30 cases of HER-2 (breast cancer), 5 cases of EWSR1 (sarcoma) and 5 cases of ALK (lung cancer). The data were analyzed using paired t-test to compare the performance of TM and DI methods. The results showed a high degree of concordance between them. This implied that both methods had similar efficiency in detecting HER-2, EWSR1, and ALK of FISH signal interpretation analysis. However, using DI method seemed to be more convenient and effective regarding human usage.