The argyrophilic nucleolar organizer regions(AgNORs) staining is one of the useful methods for the estimation of proliferative activity in conventional histologic sections in various benign and malignant lesions. Because of difficulties in AgNORs counting, there is a relucance to accept the technique as a reliable diagnostic tooL We measured the area and numbers of ARNORs in 22 surgically resected infiltrating ductal carcinomas and 5 fibroadenomas using image analyzer and also visually enumerated the numbers at x 1000 magnification. The number of AgNORs by visual conuting was correlated with the area measured by Image counting(r=0.56). The mean area of AgNORs in the malignant group(4.36um(2)) was significantly different(p<0.0001) from that of the benikn group(0.79pm). As the number of AgNORs increased, the area increased(r=0.7091 The result of this study suggests that measurement using image analyzer can give more objective and reproduccible measurement of ARNORs than visual counting.
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