Textural analysis in the diagnosis of benign and malignant breast cells.

Objective: To study the discriminatory capacity of textural variables to classify the nuclei of breast tumor cells as benign or malignant, using a statistical approach.

Study Design: Image analysis techniques were used to automatically segment nuclei of cells obtained by fine needle aspiration and Papanicolaou stained. The sample comprised 95 cases of malignant lesions and 47 cases of benign lesions (approximately 25 nuclei per case), and 27 textural variables were measured.