Magnetic resonance imaging is a technique for the diagnosis and classification of brain tumors. Discrete compactness is a morphological feature of two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects. This measure determines the compactness of a discretized object depending on the sum of the areas of the connected voxels and has been used for understanding the morphology of nonbrain tumors. We hypothesized that regarding brain tumors, we may improve the malignancy grade classification. We analyzed the values in 20 patients with different subtypes of primary brain tumors: astrocytoma, oligodendroglioma, and glioblastoma multiforme subdivided into the contrast-enhanced and the necrotic tumor regions. The preliminary results show an inverse relationship between the compactness value and the malignancy grade of gliomas. Astrocytomas exhibit a mean of [Formula: see text], whereas oligodendrogliomas exhibit a mean of [Formula: see text]. In contrast, the contrast-enhanced region of the glioblastoma presented a mean of [Formula: see text], and the necrotic region presented a mean of [Formula: see text]. However, the volume and area of the enclosing surface did not show a relationship with the malignancy grade of the gliomas. Discrete compactness appears to be a stable characteristic between primary brain tumors of different malignancy grades, because similar values were obtained from different patients with the same type of tumor.
Keywords: brain tumors; discrete compactness; gliobastoma multiforme; magnetic resonance imaging; neuromorphometry.