Quantifying brain atrophy of Multiple System Atrophy of the Cerebellar type (MSA-C) using fractal dimension analysis

Multiple system atrophy-cerebellar (MSA-C) is a degenerative neurological disease of brain. In this study, we used three-dimensional (3D) fractal dimension (FD) method to investigate the structural complexity change of human cerebellum white matter (CBWM) and gray matter (CBGM) for MSA-C disease diagnosis. The original T-1 weighted magnetic resonance (MR) images of twenty-three MSA-C patients and twenty-one normal subjects were processed and the 3D CBGM and 3D CBGM were quantitatively analysed by the FD method. Results showed that FD values of the CBWM and CBGM of the MSA-C patients were significantly smaller comparing with the control group. Furthermore, the results of this study also demonstrated that the FD method is superior to the conventionally volumetric method in terms of better accuracy and sensitivity. The use of FD analysis in conjunction with the conventionally volumetric methods further allows us to establish a separating line in the FD-volume scatter plot of CBWM to identify the occurrence of cerebellum atrophy, which can serve as an early-stage indicator for detecting the MSA-C disease.