Morphological Analysis of Cells by Scanning Electron Microscopy

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The goal of this study is to identify geometrical differences in the boundary structure of cells using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). A variety of cancer tissues have been demonstrated to possess their own structural identities defined as fractal dimensions when they are grown in vivo . Fractal structure is clearly characterized by recursive self-similarity over scales suggesting that the fractal geometry of cancer could be applicable to cells as well as to tissues. However, the fractal geometry of cancer in a single cell has not been elucidated. Here we investigate the fractal structure of several different cell lines established from normal and cancer tissues using SEM. The data from SEM imaging allowed us to determine the fine boundary structure of human breast cells including MCF10A (normal cell line), MCF7 (weakly invasive cell line), and MDA-MB231 (highly invasive cell line). A box-counting analysis of cell boundaries extracted from the SEM images revealed that each cell line has a diagnostic inclination toward a fractal structure although it is not much different from each other.