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Chromatin appearance in breast epithelial cells has been shown to have fractal properties, and detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) is an effective method for characterizing the scaling in non-stationary fractal signals in terms of a scaling exponent. This study examines the use of DFA for the characterization of chromatin appearance in breast epithelial cells. Images of nuclei representative of fine-needle aspiration biopsies of the breast are characterized in terms of the scaling exponent for 19 patients with benign lesions and 22 patients with invasive ductal carcinoma. Characterizing patients by the standard deviations of the values of the scaling exponent for their representative nuclei, a statistically significant difference is noted between benign and malignant cases. This reflects that malignancies exhibit less variability in chromatin roughness than do benign cases. Previous logistic regression models for the diagnosis of breast epithelial cell lesions are improved upon by incorporating the standard deviation of the scaling exponent. Using leave-one-out cross-validation, the best logistic regression classifiers demonstrate a sensitivity of 95% and a specificity of 100%. A combination of DFA and lacunarity analysis is seen to provide the best approach to characterizing chromatin in breast epithelial cell nuclei.

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