Fractal analysis in the quantification of medical imaging associated with multiple sclerosis pathology

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an inveterate phlogistic situation characterized by focal and vaguely diffusive de-myelination and neurodegeneration, in the sphere of central nervous system (CNS). The brain's chronic inflammatory reaction includes astrocyte stimulation and microglial motivation, as well as macrophages marginal conscription. This lasting serious soreness of the brain is connected with neurodegeneration period and disability advance.

The present study is considering two main purposes as follows. Primarily, to apply the fractal analysis in the idea of documenting the fractals dominance at all stages of the nervous system hierarchy, giving faith to the precept of their funciar relevancy. Secondly, to take into account the problems unresolved of the thorough connections between self-organized criticality concept and self-similarity notion. More precisely, in reality we will obtain information about the fractal size and lacunarity of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), on the areas of interest of the brain, rich in microglial cells with fringes from peripheral macrophages cells.

This approach will play a decisive role in the action of detecting neural disabilities, such as in particular multiple sclerosis cortical onset, the final goal of our investigation. The diagnosis is based on interpretation of both histological sample pictures and images obtained by nuclear magnetic resonance. Using fractal analysis, we have calculated, for each image separately, both the fractal dimension and the lacunarity, as an objective quantitative measure of the demyelinating action.

For three histopathological samples on glial cells, with visible erosions, the fractal dimension has value over 1.89 and the lacunarity value is between 0.050 and 0.079. In the gray level stages of the studied MRI pictures, the fractal dimension is above the value of 1.7 and the lacunarity is between the values of 0.0286 and 0.0393.