Statistical analysis of fractal-based brain tumor detection algorithms

Fractals are geometric objects that have a noninteger fractal dimension (FD). The FD has been exploited for various biomedical recognition applications such as breast tumor and lung tumor detection. Our previous work shows that the FD is useful in the detection of brain tumors when a reference nontumor image is available. In this work, we extend our previous work by statistically validating the results of FD analysis on a set of 80 real MR and CT images. Our half-image technique requires that the tumor is located in one half of the brain whereas our whole-image technique does not. Furthermore, we alleviate the need for a reference (control) nontumor image to compute the tumor FD, which was necessary in our previous work. We also compare the brain tumor detection performance of our algorithms with other fractal-based algorithms in the literature and statistically validate our results against manually segmented tumor images. We find that the tumor region offers a statistically significant lower FD compared with that of the nontumor area for most of the FD algorithms studied in this work. Thus, our statistical analysis suggests that these FD algorithms may be exploited successfully to determine the possible presence and location of brain tumors in MR and CT images.