Analysis of Ki-67 expression in women with breast cancer: Comparative evaluation of two different methodologies by immunophenotyping

Pathology - Research and Practice, 2022

Abstract

The Ki-67 antigen is a nuclear protein with proven prognostic value in different neoplasms and recognizes the predictive value in breast cancer (BC). No consensus exists on the ideal cutoff point. In this study, Ki-67 expression was evaluated in samples of BC by flow cytometry (FC) and compared with immunohistochemical (IHC) examination. For this, the BC tissue samples were sectioned, macerated, filtered, and marked with anti-Ki-67 FITC and anti-CD45 V500 antibodies. We selected the neoplastic cells according to CD45 expression and size and internal complexity (FSC × SSC) using the Infinicity 1.7 software. Lymphocytes were negative control. We compared the results with IHC analyses carried out in parallel and independently. The expression of Ki-67 was evaluated in both methodologies through Bland–Altman analysis. Among the 44 samples analyzed, only three showed bias higher than the established confidence interval (mean bias 2.1%, p = 0.62), with no significant difference for the perfect mean bias (0%). Therefore, one can state that FC provides results equivalent to IHC analysis and possibly analyzes more cells simultaneously. The results obtained in this study show the absence of observational bias through software analysis in a larger number of tumor cell populations. We can conclude that FC may be a promising alternative method for investigating Ki-67 in solid tumours.

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