Automatic prediction of tumour malignancy in breast cancer with fractal dimension

Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent types of cancer today in women. The main avenue of diagnosis is through manual examination of histopathology tissue slides. Such a process is often subjective and error-ridden, suffering from both inter- and intraobserver variability. Our objective is to develop an automatic algorithm for analysing histopathology slides free of human subjectivity. Here, we calculate the fractal dimension of images of numerous breast cancer slides, at magnifications of 40×, 100×, 200× and 400×. Using machine learning, specifically, the support vector machine (SVM) method, the F1 score for classification accuracy of the 40× slides was found to be 0.979. Multiclass classification on the 40× slides yielded an accuracy of 0.556. A reduction of the size and scope of the SVM training set gave an average F1 score of 0.964. Taken together, these results show great promise in the use of fractal dimension to predict tumour malignancy.

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