Fractal Analysis of Radiological Images: A Novel Quantitative Approach

Nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory and fractal geometry have been widely used to study biologic systems and there are many applications regarding using them in biomedical sciences. Fractal image analysis which provides a new approach to quantify the properties of images and describe them as fractal dimension and multifractal spectra is one of the novel methods to explore complex images in a scale-independent format as a whole. In this paper the fractal analysis of radiological images as a new diagnostic quantitative procedure has been introduced via different examples. Several mathe-matical methods for calculating the multifractal spectrum of radiological images are discussed. It is shown that quantifying the characteristics of radiological images as fractal dimensions can help to develop a diagnostic tool for radiologists to reduce the errors in their diagnoses.