Quantification of Morphological Changes in Breast Cancer by Fractal Analysis

Introduction & Fractals are complex geometric structures, which was introduced in 1975, and gained special place in medicine. Fractals are used in diagnosis of bone disease and structural of bone malignancies and heart arrhythmia diseases and it seems that fractals can be brought in any structural anarshaes, like cancers, for diagnosis and prognosis evaluation by quantifying it and expressing it in terms of fractal geometry. In this study we evaluate pathologic grades or breast carcinomas by fractal analysis. In this cross-sectional study 60 women with breast ductal carcinoma, of pathology grades 2 and 3, were recruited. They were randomly selected among 1000 women in Booali Hospital, Tehran, Iran, during the years 2008 to 2010. From all the patients some photographs from the smears with pathological standard and with Digital Sony Camera (700 Mega-pixel) were taken to analyze them by MATLAB software (version 7.0.1.246 [R14] Service Pack 3, Tehran, Iran) via Box-Counting method. The used analytical methods were ANOVA and T tests. The mean age of the women were 52.48±10.83 of these, 38(63.3%) had grade 2 and 22 (36.7%) had grade 3. The average size of tumor was 2.8±1.48. The mean fractal count was 1.95±0.03. There was a significant association between fractal count and pathological grade and the mean fractal count was 1.94±0.03 in grade 2 and 1.98±0.004 in grade 3 patients (P < 0.001). According to our results, it may be concluded that fractal count is a prognostic indicator in breast cancer patients. However, it is recommended to perform further studies with higher sample volume and also in other caners to obtain more definitive results.