Separation of preterm infection model from normal pregnancy in mice using texture analysis of second harmonic generation images

This paper presents an image processing system to distinguish a lipopolysaccharide (LPS) infection model of preterm labor from normal mouse pregnancy using Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) images of mouse cervix. Two classes of SHG images are considered: images from mice in which premature birth was caused by intrauterine LPS administration and images from normal pregnant mice. A wide collection of image texture features consisting of co-occurrence matrix-based, granulometry-based and wavelet-based are examined. The results obtained indicate that the combination of co-occurrence-based and granulometry-based textures features provides the most effective texture set for separating these two classes of images.