| US 7,590,273 B2 | ||
| Estimation of solitary pulmonary nodule diameters with a hybrid segmentation approach | ||
| Toshiro Kubota, Malvern, Pa. (US); and Kazunori Okada, Plainsboro, N.J. (US) | ||
| Assigned to Siemens Corporate Research, Inc., Princeton, N.J. (US); and Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Malvern, Pa. (US) | ||
| Filed on Apr. 04, 2006, as Appl. No. 11/398,099. | ||
| Claims priority of provisional application 60/669438, filed on Apr. 08, 2005. | ||
| Prior Publication US 2006/0228013 A1, Oct. 12, 2006 | ||
| Int. Cl. G06K 9/00 (2006.01) | ||
| U.S. Cl. 382—131 [382/128; 382/173; 382/224; 378/8; 378/62; 378/15; 378/901] | 13 Claims |
| 1. A computer-implemented method for estimating a diameter of an object of interest, comprising: a computer to implement the
steps of:
providing a volume of interest comprising a marker identifying a location of the object of interest;
extracting a sub-volume of voxels around the marker; initializing at least two volumes of the sub-volume, wherein each of
the voxels has at least two values corresponding to the at least two volumes, respectively;
performing, iteratively, a diffusion operation and a reaction operation on the voxels to update at least two values;
comparing, for each voxel, the at least two values to a threshold to assign each voxel to one of the at least two volumes,
wherein the assignment of the voxels is a segmentation result;
performing a boundary check to determine whether the object of interest is solitary;
estimating a diameter of the object of interest from the segmentation result upon determining the object of interest to be
solitary; and
extracting the object of interest by performing ellipsoid fit on the sub-volume and estimating a diameter of the object of
interest upon determining the object of interest to be non-solitary.
|