Follicular cells in pituitary neuroendocrine tumors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Follicular cells (FCs) are thought to be agranular, non-hormone-producing stellate cells distributed throughout the adenohypophysis, occasionally arranged around colloid-filled follicles, and thought to be more prominent in the vicinity of necrosis and apoptotic cells. A distinct but similar cell type, the folliculostellate cell (FSC), is a sustentacular cell that is negative for keratins and stains for S100, GFAP, and SOX10. While several studies have examined FSCs in pituitary neuroendocrine tumors (PitNETs), the distribution and derivation of FCs in these lesions is unclear. We examined the presence and distribution of FCs in 104 PitNETs obtained by trans-sphenoidal surgery, using immunohistochemistry for keratins as well as the full complement of immunohistochemical stains for tumor characterization. The tumors included 9 somatotroph, 5 mammosomatotroph, 7 lactotroph, 7 immature PIT1-lineage, 2 acidophil stem cell, 17 corticotroph, 53 gonadotroph, 2 null cell, and 2 unusual plurihormonal tumors. CK-positive FCs were only identified in gonadotroph PitNETs and were found in 12 (23%) of those tumors; all other tumor types were negative for FCs. FCs express keratins identified by CAM5.2, AE1/AE3, CK18, and CK19 antibodies. FCs were identified scattered singly among hormone-producing neuroendocrine cells, in small clusters of 3-5 cells and surrounding colloid-filled follicles, as well as linearly along intratumoral blood vessels. Sequential stains showed that FCs express nuclear SF1 and GATA3, transcription factors of gonadotrophs, and multiplex immunohistochemistry confirmed colocalization of SF1 in the nucleus of keratin-positive FCs. In this series, FCs were exclusively found in gonadotroph PitNETs and occurred in 23% of those tumors. Co-expression of gonadotroph transcription factors in FCs supports the concept of cellular plasticity and transformation of neoplastic hormone-producing neuroendocrine cells to FCs. Further studies are required to determine if and why gonadotrophs alone undergo this transformation, the function of these cells and whether they have prognostic value.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".