Tumor cells in human brain show multifractality! A multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis from the MRI images

Abstract

The multifractal study of tumorous and normal brain MRI images has been reported. The brain MRI images recorded at the axial, colonal, and sagittal planes were used to perform the Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MFDFA) study. The nonlinear graphs of h(q) vs. q and τ(q) vs. q primarily depict that the tumorous MRI images are multifractal, while the normal brain MRI images don't show any sign of multifractal features. The tumorous brain MRI images are multifractal since their singularity spectra exhibit a bell-curve pattern with finite spectral widths (W) in each of the three planes. Interestingly, the MRI images of normal brain does not exhibit such phenomenon. The presence of multifractality in tumor cells as concluded from this manuscript will definitely provide a leeway for other researchers to explore the calculations further in order to identify the benign and malignant tumors, which we believe may exhibit different degrees of multifractalities. For both the tumorous and non-tumorous images, the MF-DFA tool was also used to find their asymmetry indices (B) and correlation coefficients (γ). These investigations lead us to conclude that, multifractality may be used to differentiate between the tumorous and non-tumorous brain MRI images in the Axial, Colonal and Sagittal planes. Furthermore, the findings of this study might encourage other researchers to execute MFDFA analyses at different phases of tumor growth and radiation.