ABSTRACT
Tumor growth in the cervix is a complex process. Understanding this phenomena is quite relevant in order to establish proper diagnosis and therapy strategies and a possible startpoint is to evaluate its complexity through the scaling analysis, which define the tumor growth geometry. In this work, tumor interface from primary tumors of squamous cells and adenocarcinomas for cervical cancer were extracted. Fractal dimension and local roughness exponent (Barabási and Stanley (1996)), αloc, were calculated to characterize the in vivo 3-D tumor growth. Image acquisition was carried out according to the standard protocol used for cervical cancer radiotherapy, i.e., axial, magnetic resonance T1 - weighted contrast enhanced images comprising the cervix volume for image registration. Image processing was carried out by a classification scheme based on quantum clustering algorithm (Mussa et al. (2015)) combined with the application of the K-means procedure upon contrasted images (Demirkaya et al. (2008)). The results show significant variations of the parameters depending on the tumor stage and its histological origin.
Subject(s)
Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted/methods , Uterine Cervical Neoplasms/diagnostic imaging , Adenocarcinoma/diagnostic imaging , Adenocarcinoma/pathology , Algorithms , Carcinoma, Squamous Cell/diagnostic imaging , Carcinoma, Squamous Cell/pathology , Cluster Analysis , Female , Fractals , Humans , Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted/statistics & numerical data , Imaging, Three-Dimensional , Magnetic Resonance Imaging , Quantum Theory , Uterine Cervical Neoplasms/pathologyABSTRACT
The tumor growth is a complex process characterized by the proliferation of uncontrollable cells which invade neighbor tissues. The understanding process of this type of phenomena is very relevant in order to establish diagnosis and proper therapy strategies and to start the valorization of its complexity with proper descriptors produced by the scaling analysis, which define the tumor growth geometry. In this work, obtained results through the scaling analysis for pilocytic astrocytomas, anaplastic and diffuse, are shown, which tumors of primary origin are. On them, it is calculated the fractal dimension and critical exponents of local roughness to characterize in vivo 3-D tumor growth. The acquisition of the images for this type of injuries was carried out according to the standard protocol used for brain radiotherapy and radiosurgery, i.e., axial, coronal and sagittal magnetic resonance T1 weighted images and comprising the brain volume for image registration. Image segmentation was performed by the application the k-means procedure upon contrasted images. The results show significant variations of the parameters depending on the tumor stage and its histological origin.
