Fractal analysis of contours of breast masses in mammograms via the power spectra of their signatures

Contours of benign breast masses and malignant tumors in mammograms differ substantially in their shape and complexity; the former are usually round and smooth, whereas the latter are typically spiculated and irregular. We demonstrate the usefulness of fractal analysis via a frequency domain approach applied to one-dimensional signatures of the two-dimensional contours of breast masses. The 1/f model was applied to power spectra of signatures to estimate the fractal dimension. Tests with a dataset of 111 contours, including those of 65 benign masses and 46 malignant tumors, indicated a high classification performance of 0.89 in terms of the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve.