Influence of intra-tumoral heterogeneity on the evaluation of BCL2, E-cadherin, EGFR, EMMPRIN, and Ki-67 expression in tissue microarrays from breast cancer

Figures & data

Figure 1. Frequency of positive tumors for markers BCL2, E-cadherin, EGFR, EMMPRIN, and Ki-67. Immunohistochemical analyzes of markers were interpreted from TMA cores, one central (C) and one peripheral (P), and whole slide sections (W) each from two blocks (1 and 2) from each tumor. All cases have been scored by two observers, 1 and 2, respectively. Only tumors that were interpretable on all cores and sections were included in the analysis.

Table 1. Kappa values describing comparisons between immunohistochemial stainings for BCL2, E-Cadherin, EGFR, EMMPRIN (10% cut offs), and Ki67 (20% cut offs) of 108 TMA biopsies and 54 whole slide sections (WS) from 27 breast carcinomas.

	BCL2		E-cadherin		EGFR		EMMPRIN		Ki67
Observer	1	2	1	2	1	2	1	2	1	2
Intra-block agreement
TMA central cores vs peripheral	0.95	0.89	0.95	0.82	1.00	0.81	0.55	0.50	0.66	0.85
TMA central cores vs WS	0.84	0.90	0.95	0.89	1.00	0.67	0.60	0.45	0.53	0.55
TMA peripheral cores vs WS	0.78	0.90	0.90	0.83	1.00	0.82	0.76	0.49	0.57	0.73
TMA central + peripheral cores vs WS	0.79	0.90	0.95	0.90	1.00	0.82	0.78	0.57	0.51	0.70
Inter-block agreement
TMA central cores	1.00	0.90	1.00	0.89	1.00	0.78	0.90	0.50	0.67	0.68
TMA peripheral cores	0.89	0.89	0.89	0.48	0.88	0.86	0.59	0.27	0.43	0.90
TMA central + peripheral cores	0.90	0.90	1.00	0.90	0.88	0.86	0.55	0.38	0.74	0.82
Whole slide sections	0.90	0.91	0.90	0.91	0.79	0.79	0.69	0.55	0.77	0.76
Inter-observer agreement
TMA cores	0.95		0.91		0.82		0.78		0.33
Whole slide sections	0.90		0.90		1.00		0.63		0.54