Abstract
Measuring “chewiness” and “over a throat” enables us to evaluate an aspect of taste in an elastic food objectively. Today, some technologies to investigate the hardness and texture of a food physically are practically used. However, there is no effective method to observe distribution of hard and soft area inside an elastic food and a plastic food. Then, we proposed a new method to evaluate and visualize the distribution of hard and soft area inner both an elastic food and a plastic food, which is based on ultrasound image processing. We examined the performance of this method by two experiments: a computer simulation and a phantom experiment. As a result, although there is room for improvement on the proposed method, it was shown that this method can visualize the distribution of relatively hard and soft area inside a food as a two dimensional image.
