Histological fractal-based classification of brain tumors

Omar S. Al-Kadi, Antonio Di Ieva

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

    Abstract

    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. Brain meningioma subtype classifications improvement from histopathological images is the main focus of this chapter. Meningioma tissue texture exhibits a wide range of histological patterns whereby a single slide may show a combination of multiple patterns. Distinctive fractal patterns quantified in a multiresolution manner would be for better spatial relationship representation. Fractal features extracted from textural tissue patterns can be useful in characterizing meningioma tumors in terms of subtype classification, a challenging problem compared to histological grading, and furthermore can provide an objective measure for quantifying subtle features within subtypes that are hard to discriminate.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationThe Fractal geometry of the brain
    EditorsAntonio Di Ieva
    Place of PublicationNew York
    PublisherSpringer, Springer Nature
    Pages371-391
    Number of pages21
    ISBN (Print)9781493939954
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2016

    Publication series

    NameSpringer Series in Computational Neuroscience
    PublisherSpringer

    Keywords

    • fractal dimension
    • texture analysis
    • brain histopathology
    • meningioma
    • tissue characterization
    • pattern classification

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