Patent ID: 9251596
Filing Date: 2016-02-02
CPC Classification: G06K,G06T

Claim Text:
1. A method of processing medical images, the method being performed by a computer processor and comprising steps of: (a) obtaining one or more atlases containing one or more images, the one or more images are characterized in that they are composed of a plurality of voxels wherein at least some of the voxels correspond to one or more anatomical features that have been labelled with label data; (b) obtaining a plurality of unlabelled images each composed of a respective plurality of voxels; (c) comparing the one or more labelled images and each unlabelled image of the plurality of unlabeled images, resulting in a comparison; (d) based on the comparison, selecting one or more unlabelled images that most closely resemble(s) one or more of the labelled images; (e) propagating label data of the one or more labelled anatomical features from the one or more closest of the labelled images to each of the selected one or more unlabelled images, so that when the corresponding anatomical feature(s) of each of the selected images(s) become labelled, the selected image(s) become labelled image(s); and (f) iteratively repeating from step (c), thereby labelling, for each iteration, one or more others of the unlabelled images of the plurality of unlabelled images so as to increase the number of labelled images contained in the one or more atlases.