Rationale and objectives: The authors evaluated the feasibility of using statistical fractal-dimension features to improve discrimination between benign and malignant breast masses at magnetic resonance (MR) imaging.
Materials and methods: The study evaluated MR images of 32 malignant and 20 benign breast masses from archived data at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. The test set included four cases that were difficult to evaluate on the basis of border characteristics. All diagnoses had been confirmed at excisional biopsy. The fractal-dimension feature was computed as the mean of a sample space of fractal-dimension estimates derived from fractal interpolation function models. To evaluate the performance of the fractal-dimension feature, the classification effectiveness of five expert-observer architectural features was compared with that of the fractal dimension combined with four expert-observer features. Feature sets were evaluated with receiver operating characteristic analysis. Discrimination analysis used artificial neural networks and logistic regression. Robustness of the fractal-dimension feature was evaluated by determining changes in discrimination when the algorithm parameters were perturbed.
Results: The combination of fractal-dimension and expert-observer features provided a statistically significant improvement in discrimination over that achieved with expert-observer features alone. Perturbing selected parameters in the fractal-dimension algorithm had little effect on discrimination.
Conclusion: A statistical fractal-dimension feature appears to be useful in distinguishing MR images of benign and malignant breast masses in cases where expert radiologists may have difficulty. The statistical approach to estimating the fractal dimension appears to be more robust than other fractal measurements on data-limited medical images.