Software Phantoms for Texture Analysis

Abstract

Texture analysis (TA) is a potential tool for analysis of medical images. It can be used for classification of pathological tissue. Co-occurrence matrix is one of the most promising TA methods. In this study we have analysed this method by using software phantoms instead of physical phantoms. This choice was made because the construction process of a real phantom is slow and only one set of parameter results is available. The software phantoms were implemented with Matlab program by constructing 16x16 matrices containing four different grey level values. Value from 0 to 1, 0 corresponding to black and 1 being white, was given for each matrix element to perform different texture patterns. Grey scale images were drawn from the matrices and the texture analysis was performed with MaZda. Software phantoms were proved to be an effective method to study the parameter value distribution because of the easy construction and modification of the matrices. However, more complex patterns should be used for further studies.