Texture analysis of fluorescence microscopic images of colonic tissue sections

The aim of this study was to assess the potential of texture analysis for the characterization of fluorescence images from colonic tissue sections stained with a novel and selective fluoroprobe, Rhodamine B-phenylboronic acid. Fluorescence microscopy images of colonic healthy mucosa (n = 35) and adenocarcinomas (n = 35) were digitally captured and subjected to image texture analysis. Textural features derived from the grey level co-occurrence matrix were calculated. A modified version of the multiple discriminant analysis criterion was used to choose an appropriate subset of features. A minimum Mahalanobis distance, linear discriminant classifier and a simple evaluation 'score' method were used to classify image feature data into the two categories. A subset of four textural features was selected and used for the description and classification of each image field. They were found appropriate to correctly classify 95% of the images into the two classes, using two different classifiers. These features contained information about local homogeneity and grey level linear dependencies of the image. This study demonstrated that texture analysis techniques could provide valuable diagnostic decision support in a complex domain such as colorectal tissue.