Development and implementation of a simple digitizer for morphometry

A simple digitizer with utilizes a piece of touch panel position sensor (TPPS) material and a homemade control board has been developed for semi-automatic quantitative morphometry. The profile areas were digitized by tracing with a freehand drawing and the raw data were then stored in a personal computer (PC) for further processing. This is an extremely useful tool for digitizing and converting graphic data from previously published data for comparison and/or processing of new physical parameters. Sequential architecture of hardware and software components for control and data acquisition are described and discussed in this paper. The resolution and accuracy of this PC-based digitizer are also characterized and discussed.