News and Announcements

Dr. Arthur J. Lesser has been appointed director of the Division of Health Services of the Children's Bureau. Federal Security Agency.
 Dr. Lesser succeeds Dr. Edwin Daily, who resigned to become Deputy Medical Director of the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York.
 As director of health services, Dr. Lesser will be responsible for the administration of the maternal and child health and crippled children's programs of the Children's Bureau.


European Consensus on Standardized AgNOR Analysis in Cytopathology
After the pioneering work by Ploton et al. [1] silver staining of nucleolar organizer regions (AgNOR) has been introduced into tumour pathology as a proliferation marker which is closely related to the rapidity of cell cycle [2]. Owing to wet autoclave pretreatment introduced by Öfner et al. [3] AgNOR analysis has now widely been standardized in tissue sections [4]. In cytological specimens, however, an internationally accepted standardization of this method is still missing.
Since AgNOR analysis is of value in diagnostic decision making particularly in effusion cytology [5,6] a consensus on AgNOR evaluation in cytopathology is urgently needed. Therefore, during the 6th Congress of the European Society of Analytical Cellular Pathology (ESACP), April 10th in Heidelberg, Germany, a joint meeting took place of the newly founded "ESACP-Task Force on Standardization of AgNOR Analysis in Diagnostic Cytopathology" together with the "Committee on AgNOR Quantification" within the European Society of Pathology (ESP). 23 participants, revealing their experiences and interests in the method, attended and discussed the draft of a consensus paper, submitted by A. Böcking, Düsseldorf and J. Rüschoff, Kassel. Based on this paper the following aspects of the method have been discussed: (1) biological background, (2) indications and aims, (3) types of materials, (4) fixation, (5) staining, (6) quantitative evaluation, (7) combination with other parameters, (8) references. These chapters were finally delegated for review and elaboration of an updated and improved version to different specialists in the field.
These colleagues agreed to newly edit the respective chapters for presentation and discussion during the 7th International Workshop on AgNOR Quantification in Innsbruck, Austria, on October 1-3rd 1999. It is the aim of this meeting to workout a proposal that will form the basis of a European Consensus on Standardized Diagnostic AgNOR-Quantification in Diagnostic Cytopathology.
Every scientist and pathologist interested in participation and elaboration of this document is hereby invited to contact either A. Böcking in Düsseldorf (e-mail: boecking@uni-duesseldorf.de) or J. Rüschoff in Kassel (e-mail: ruesch@klinikum-kassel.de) for being involved.

EUROQUANT -a quantitation server makes DNA cytometry more standardized and reliable
With the ESACP consensus reports on DNA image cytometry, published in ACP in 1995 and 1998, the diagnostic use of that method has been reinforced.
The key issue of the 1997 update of the consensus is the agreement on algorithms and procedures for quality control, derived from statistical approaches in all stages of the entire technological and diagnostic procedure.
So far, an application of the methods recommended in the consensus could have been rather difficult in routine laboratories working with commercial DNA cytometers.
In the framework of European Research and Technological Development programmes PRESS and EU-ROPATH a quantitation server named EUROQUANT (http://euroquant.med.tu-dresden.de) was developed that enables pathologists to have their measurements checked for consistency with the quality control recommendations of the ESACP consensus twenty-four hours a day all days the week. That server is Internet technology based, accessible via the Internet itself or via direct ISDN connection. According the clientserver-concept the clients (telepathology workstations or simple PCs) are served by the EUROQUANT with data operations they want to have on their own measurement data. Special server techniques guarantee the data privacy of the users. The data flow is shown in Fig. 1.
Pathologists running DNA cytometry devices may transfer measurement data from their machines to the server. They will get a standardised data display of their actual measurement and statistical analysis of a series of measurements according the consensus recommendations. In that way a process control of the daily routine is easily to obtain. Furthermore, the necessary corrective factors will be computed, and their statistics analysed. All those data can be downloaded from the server for further analysis and use in diagnostics, as well as for the data exchange in multicenter studies.
Finally, pathologists without an own cytometry device can have images from Feulgen stained cytological specimens analysed for DNA ploidy by the server, too.
All server functions are explained by online help texts and by a manual.
Up to now, more than 40 laboratories from Europe, USA, and Asia have performed analyses on about 3000 ploidy data sets successfully. For few of them, the server has been incorporated in the quality control of daily routine in DNA image cytometry.