Fractal analysis: fractal dimension and lacunarity from MR images for differentiating the grades of glioma

Glioma, the heterogeneous tumors originating from glial cells, generally exhibit varied grades and are difficult to differentiate using conventional MR imaging techniques. When this differentiation is crucial in the disease prognosis and treatment, even the advanced MR imaging techniques fail to provide a higher discriminative power for the differentiation of malignant tumor from benign ones. A powerful image processing technique applied to the imaging techniques is expected to provide a better differentiation. The present study focuses on the fractal analysis of fluid attenuation inversion recovery MR images, for the differentiation of glioma. For this, we have considered the most important parameters of fractal analysis, fractal dimension and lacunarity. While fractal analysis assesses the malignancy and complexity of a fractal object, lacunarity gives an indication on the empty space and the degree of inhomogeneity in the fractal objects. Box counting method with the preprocessing steps namely binarization, dilation and outlining was used to obtain the fractal dimension and lacunarity in glioma. Statistical analysis such as one-way analysis of variance and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis helped to compare the mean and to find discriminative sensitivity of the results. It was found that the lacunarity of low and high grade gliomas vary significantly. ROC curve analysis between low and high grade glioma for fractal dimension and lacunarity yielded 70.3% sensitivity and 66.7% specificity and 70.3% sensitivity and 88.9% specificity, respectively. The study observes that fractal dimension and lacunarity increases with an increase in the grade of glioma and lacunarity is helpful in identifying most malignant grades.