MedQIA provides a wide range of texture analysis tools based on co-occurrence matrices, run-length , fractals and Laws’ microtexture masks. These texture measures have been used in the development of a number of quantitative lung imaging biomarkers (McNitt 99, Prasad 2008, Kim 2008).

Using a feature selection algorithm the top two texture features for discriminating between the disease classes of asthma, emphysema, scleroderma and normal lung. This process involved elimination of correlated features and linear discriminant analysis, leading to the selection of two main texture measures: a Horizontal Edge measure derived from Law’s microtexture masks and the First Information Measure of Correlation from the co-occurrence matrix. The graph below plots these two texture measures on the coordinate axes for normal subjects and patients within three different disease groups. It shows discrimination between the groups with some expected areas of overlap.