Fractal Properties of Biophysical Models of Pericellular Brushes Can Be Used to Differentiate Between Cancerous and Normal Cervical Epithelial Cells

TL;DR

This study uses fractal analysis of biophysical models to differentiate cancerous from normal cervical cells, revealing that fractal dimension and lacunarity are effective discriminators influenced by brush properties and imaging resolution.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed fractal and lacunarity analysis of biophysical cell models, linking fractal properties to cell malignancy differentiation.

Findings

Fractal dimension is higher in soft polydisperse brushes under poor solvent conditions.

Healthy cell models exhibit more textured brush images with larger lacunarity.

Image resolution significantly affects the accuracy of cell differentiation based on fractal analysis.

Abstract

Fractal behavior is found on the topographies of pericellular brushes on the surfaces of model healthy and cancerous cells, using dissipative particle dynamics models and simulations. The influence of brush composition, chain stiffness and solvent quality on the fractal dimension is studied in detail. Since fractal dimension alone cannot guarantee that the brushes possess fractal properties, their lacunarity was obtained also, which is a measure of the space filling capability of fractal objects. Soft polydisperse brushes are found to have larger fractal dimension than soft monodisperse ones, under poor solvent conditions, in agreement with recent experiments on dried cancerous and healthy human cervical epithelial cells. Additionally, we find that image resolution is critical for the accurate assessment of differences between images from different cells. The images of the brushes on healthy model cells are found to be more textured than those of brushes on model cancerous cells, as indicated by the larger lacunarity of the former. These findings are helpful to distinguish monofractal behavior from multifractality, which has been found to be useful to discriminate between immortal, cancerous and normal cells in recent experiments.