Abstract.A new spectral signature analysis method for tumor segmentation in breast magnetic resonance images is presented. The proposed method is called an independent component texture analysis (ICTA), which consists of three techniques including independent component analysis (ICA), entropy-based thresholding, and texture feature registration (TFR). ICTA was mainly developed to resolve the inconsistency in the results of independent components (ICs) due to the random initial projection vector of ICA and then accordingly determine the most likely IC. A series of experiments were conducted to compare and evaluate ICTA with principal component texture analysis, traditional ICA, traditional principal component analysis (PCA), fuzzy c-means, constrained energy minimization, and orthogonal subspace projection methods. The experimental results showed that ICTA had higher efficiency than existing methods. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.