Ignacio,
MLI is a stereological technique that divides the total length of line
probes with the number of times the probes intercept some boundary of
interest; in this case it's alveolar walls in the lung. The idea is to
get an estimate of the size of the air-tissue interface (if you have
emphysema you have fewer alveolar walls and the MLI is bigger).
*Quantitative Methods in the Study of Pulmonary Pathology*
M. S. Dunnill
Thorax 1962; 17: 320-328.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/thx.17.4.320A practical implementation is to sample along a row or column of pixels,
count the number of borders you hit and then divide the total sampling
length by border hits to get MLI. There is somewhere a grid calculator
for ImageJ for people who want to do stereology, since counts by eye can
avoid difficult problems when you have to avoid counting blood vessels
as intercepts, for example, but when it is impractical to teach the
computer what a blood vessel looks like.
http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/plugins/grid.htmlMLI is also extended to a directional concept to work out anisotropy
(also called mean intercept length method, MIL). You get the mean
intercept length in different directions, which can help you work out
the orientedness of your image. I have implemented MIL for anisotropy
in 3D, which is not what is required here and probably confusing in
terms of code reuse.
Mike
Ignacio Arganda wrote:
> Anna, Simone,
> Could you explain us what exactly Mean Linear Intercept is and how do you
> measure it?
>
> Skeletonize3D and AnalyzeSkeleton are plugins to (respectively) extract the
> center-lines of 3D objects and measure them. You could maybe reuse some
> code...
>
> ignacio
>
> On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 9:09 AM, anafly <
[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have the same question as simone below, I need to calculate the Mean
>> Linear Intercept in lung tissue and was hoping to use Image J, but don't
>> know how. Can
>> anyone help me with this? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
>>
>> Thanks,
>> :>Anna
>>
>>
>> sdegan wrote:
>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> I do not know if this message has already been posted to the ImageJ
>>> community so I am re-posting it.
>>> I need to calculate the Mean Linear Intercept (MLI) in lung tissue. This
>>> means I have to calculate the number of intersections of the structure
>>> with the cutting plane of the lung. Is there anyone familiar with this?
>>>
>>> The only thing I have found is here but I have not seen the answer:
>>>
>>>
>>
http://n2.nabble.com/New-plugin:-Skeletonize3D-and-AnalyzeSkeleton-td1508856.html>>
>>> Many thanks for helping
>>>
>>> simone
>>>
>>>
>> --
>> View this message in context:
>>
http://n2.nabble.com/Mean-Linear-Intercept-tp2374546p3640301.html>> Sent from the ImageJ mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
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