Fractal Dimension and Vessel Complexity in Patients with Cerebral Arteriovenous Malformations

The fractal dimension (FD) can be used as a measure for morphological complexity in biological systems. The aim of this study was to test the usefulness of this quantitative parameter in the context of cerebral vascular complexity. Fractal analysis was applied on ten patients with cerebral arteriove...

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Main Authors:	Reishofer, Gernot, Koschutnig, Karl, Enzinger, Christian, Ebner, Franz, Ahammer, Helmut
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Public Library of Science 2012
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3399805/

id	pubmed-3399805
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-33998052012-07-19 Fractal Dimension and Vessel Complexity in Patients with Cerebral Arteriovenous Malformations Reishofer, Gernot Koschutnig, Karl Enzinger, Christian Ebner, Franz Ahammer, Helmut Research Article The fractal dimension (FD) can be used as a measure for morphological complexity in biological systems. The aim of this study was to test the usefulness of this quantitative parameter in the context of cerebral vascular complexity. Fractal analysis was applied on ten patients with cerebral arteriovenous malformations (AVM) and ten healthy controls. Maximum intensity projections from Time-of-Flight MRI scans were analyzed using different measurements of FD, the Box-counting dimension, the Minkowski dimension and generalized dimensions evaluated by means of multifractal analysis. The physiological significance of this parameter was investigated by comparing values of FD first, with the maximum slope of contrast media transit obtained from dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI data and second, with the nidus size obtained from X-ray angiography data. We found that for all methods, the Box-counting dimension, the Minkowski dimension and the generalized dimensions FD was significantly higher in the hemisphere with AVM compared to the hemisphere without AVM indicating that FD is a sensitive parameter to capture vascular complexity. Furthermore we found a high correlation between FD and the maximum slope of contrast media transit and between FD and the size of the central nidus pointing out the physiological relevance of FD. The proposed method may therefore serve as an additional objective parameter, which can be assessed automatically and might assist in the complex workup of AVMs. Public Library of Science 2012-07-18 /pmc/articles/PMC3399805/ /pubmed/22815946 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0041148 Text en Reishofer et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Reishofer, Gernot Koschutnig, Karl Enzinger, Christian Ebner, Franz Ahammer, Helmut
spellingShingle	Reishofer, Gernot Koschutnig, Karl Enzinger, Christian Ebner, Franz Ahammer, Helmut Fractal Dimension and Vessel Complexity in Patients with Cerebral Arteriovenous Malformations
author_facet	Reishofer, Gernot Koschutnig, Karl Enzinger, Christian Ebner, Franz Ahammer, Helmut
author_sort	Reishofer, Gernot
title	Fractal Dimension and Vessel Complexity in Patients with Cerebral Arteriovenous Malformations
title_short	Fractal Dimension and Vessel Complexity in Patients with Cerebral Arteriovenous Malformations
title_full	Fractal Dimension and Vessel Complexity in Patients with Cerebral Arteriovenous Malformations
title_fullStr	Fractal Dimension and Vessel Complexity in Patients with Cerebral Arteriovenous Malformations
title_full_unstemmed	Fractal Dimension and Vessel Complexity in Patients with Cerebral Arteriovenous Malformations
title_sort	fractal dimension and vessel complexity in patients with cerebral arteriovenous malformations
description	The fractal dimension (FD) can be used as a measure for morphological complexity in biological systems. The aim of this study was to test the usefulness of this quantitative parameter in the context of cerebral vascular complexity. Fractal analysis was applied on ten patients with cerebral arteriovenous malformations (AVM) and ten healthy controls. Maximum intensity projections from Time-of-Flight MRI scans were analyzed using different measurements of FD, the Box-counting dimension, the Minkowski dimension and generalized dimensions evaluated by means of multifractal analysis. The physiological significance of this parameter was investigated by comparing values of FD first, with the maximum slope of contrast media transit obtained from dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI data and second, with the nidus size obtained from X-ray angiography data. We found that for all methods, the Box-counting dimension, the Minkowski dimension and the generalized dimensions FD was significantly higher in the hemisphere with AVM compared to the hemisphere without AVM indicating that FD is a sensitive parameter to capture vascular complexity. Furthermore we found a high correlation between FD and the maximum slope of contrast media transit and between FD and the size of the central nidus pointing out the physiological relevance of FD. The proposed method may therefore serve as an additional objective parameter, which can be assessed automatically and might assist in the complex workup of AVMs.
publisher	Public Library of Science
publishDate	2012
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3399805/
_version_	1611543851059642368

Fractal Dimension and Vessel Complexity in Patients with Cerebral Arteriovenous Malformations

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