Fractals in brain tumor classification

What is it about?

Fractal Analysis of histopathological brain tumors

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Why is it important?

The structural complexity of brain tumor tissue represents a major challenge for effective histopathological diagnosis. Tumor vasculature is known to be heterogeneous and mixtures of patterns are usually present. Therefore, extracting key descriptive features for accurate quantification is not a straightforward task. Several steps are involved in the texture analysis process where tissue heterogeneity contributes to the variability of the results. One of the interesting aspects of the brain lies in its fractal nature. Many regions within the brain tissue yield similar statistical properties at different scales of magnification. Fractal-based analysis of the histological features of brain tumors can reveal the underlying complexity of tissue structure and angiostructure, also providing an indication of tissue abnormality development. It can further be used to quantify the chaotic signature of disease in order to distinguish between different temporal tumor stages and histopathological grades.