Distinguishing normal and pulmonary edema chest x-ray using Gabor filter and SVM

Pulmonary edema, i.e. excess of extravascular fluid in lungs, is a common manifestation of various clinical conditions. Although the etiology of the pulmonary edema is deduced with the help of history, physical examination and various biochemical and radiological investigations, computer aided evaluation of pulmonary edema will be helpful for physicians in determining the course of management for the condition. In this study we present texture analysis of chest x-ray, using Gabor filter and one of the machine learning techniques, Support Vector Machine (SVM), to distinguish the normal chest x-ray from the chest x-ray of pulmonary edema. This is an initial step towards computer aided quantitative assessment of the pulmonary edema using chest x-ray.