Based on the assertion that entropy and leakage are related, this paper describes the software implementation of a texture analysis technique which is based on entropy for analyzing macromolecular leakage from microvessels. Images of vessel leakage were compared to a pre-leakage image by computing their percent changes in entropy to give a relative measure of leakage. Entropy calculations were tested on different region sizes of the images to determine the regional sources as well as topographical spread of the leakage. Since entropy can be based on the statistics of both gray level components and frequency components, the FWT (Fast-Walsh Transform), FF1' (Fast-Fourier Transform), DCT (Discrete-Cosine Transform), and histogram routines were implemented in C to investigate the effects of transform type on the entropy measure. The percent changes in entropy from the frequency analyses were found to be more significant 'than changes in entropy from the histogram approach. Moreover, the FWT was found to be comparable to the FFT and DCT with regard to the entropy measure and was, thus, chosen as the better transformation because it decreased computation time and memory requirements. This software package successfully produced a texture analysis technique based on entropy. However, the exact quantitative relationship between vessel leakage and entropy measures has not fully been established.. 1. INTRODUCTION Cardiovascular imaging has experienced tremendous growth in the past few decades to produce important new diagnostic techniques for clinicians. The role of digital image processing in these diagnostic techniques is becoming increasingly more important. The dramatic increase in the use of digital computers for cardiovascular imaging has created the opportunity for clinicians, physiologists, and engineers to cooperate in the research and development of new clinical tools.An emerging area of cardiovascular research is applied microcirculatory research, which deals with blood vessels less than one millimeter in diameter. Animal research during the past two decades has greatly increased the knowledge of microcirculatory mechanisms and has uncovered the vast clinical potential of microcirculatory science. This potential was recognized by the Commonwealth of Kentucky when it established as a Center of Excellence, the Center of Applied Microcirculatory Research (CAMR) at the University of Louisville in 1987. The main goal of the Center is to develop new microcirculatory measurements that would have clinically useful applications. This paper presents the research and software development of a technique to detect and quantify macromolecular leakage. The study of leakage plays a major role in the analysis of microvasculature in tumors [1,2] and in the evaluation of vascular leakiness with regard to systemic diseases such as diabetes [3] and hypertension [4].For the analysis of leakage, in-vivo experiments on the microvasculature of the rat cremaster muscle were conducted. In these experiments, the histamine-induced leakage wa...
This paper describes the use of entropy to quantify leakage of large molecules in a microvascular system. This measure can be used as a global parameter to characterize leakage. A software package for analysis of a sequence of images comprising leakage in rat cremaster tissue has been developed. The analysis is based on the statistics of both gray level components and frequency components of the images. Results show that entropy provides a better measure of leakage because it does not depend on variation in illumination or translation and rotation of image objects. Moreover entropy based on frequency components provides a more sensitive leakage measure than entropy based on gray level components.
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