A fuzzy-based texture analysis for tissue characterization of diffused liver diseases on B-scan images

The specific texture on B-scan images is believed to be related to both ultrasound machine characteristics and tissue properties, i.e., the pathological states of the soft tissue. Therefore, for classification, features can be extracted with the use of image texture analysis techniques. In this paper a novel fuzzy approach for texture characterization is used for classification of normal liver and diffused liver diseases, here fatty liver, liver cirrhosis, and hepatitis are emphasized. The texture analysis techniques are diversified by the existence of several approaches. We propose fuzzy features for the analysis of the texture image. For this, a membership function is constructed to represent the effect of the neighboring pixels on the current pixel in a window. Using these membership function values, we find a feature by weighted average method for the current pixel. This is repeated for all pixels in the window treating each time one pixel as the current pixel. Using these fuzzy based features, we derive three descriptors: maximum, entropy, and energy as used in co-occurrence method, for each window.