Morphologic-Statistical Approach to Detection of Lesions in Liver Tissue in Fish

Abstract

The problem of light microscope images enhancement by filtering for recognition pathologic liver tissues in fish is considered in the paper. The problem follows from the necessity of monitoring the sea water pollutions caused by mercury compounds and their influence on living organisms. It is proposed to use image filtering based on morphological spectra to enhance visibility of liver lesions in the images in order to extract morphologic-statistical parameters useful in automatic tissues classification into normal and pathologic classes. It is shown that selected components of the 4th range morphologic spectra (MS4) are the most suitable to discriminate normal and pathologic liver tissues. The selected spectral components are characterized by their estimated mean values, standard deviations and kurtoses. The so-obtained morphologic-statistical parameters have been used to construct the learning sets for two types of image classifiers: based on the nearest mean and k nearest neighbors rules. It is shown that preliminary image filtering by morphological spectra-based filters improves spatial distribution of the recognized normal and pathologic objects in the parameter space.