title: Fractal analysis of contours of breast masses in mammograms via the power spectra of their signatures.
abstract: 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/ƒ 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, AB, Canada, T2N 1N4. ranga@ucalgary.ca
authors.forename: Rangaraj M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Rangayyan
authors.forename: Faraz
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Oloumi
authors.forename: Thanh M
authors.initials: TM
authors.lastname: Nguyen
mesh_terms: D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008327:Mammography / Q000379:methods*; D011857:Radiographic Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods