Patent ID: 9594871
Date: 2017-03-14
CPC Classifications: A61B,G06F,G06K,G06T,G16H

Claim:
1. A similar case retrieval apparatus comprising: a lesion portion acquirer that acquires a plurality of partial images from a plurality of interpretation target images related to a pair of right and left organs, the plurality of partial images including a plurality of lesion portion images of lesion portions, each of the plurality of partial images including a lesion portion image that is one of the plurality of lesion portion images; an image feature extractor that extracts one or more image features of each of the plurality of partial images; a location information acquirer that acquires location information of each of the plurality of partial images; a lateral position determiner that determines the right organ or the left organ in which each of the lesion portions exists based on the location information; a unilateral distribution identifier that identifies, based on the determination results by the lateral position determiner, a distribution of the lesion portions as a unilateral distribution in which the lesion portions are distributed unilaterally in either the right organ or the left organ; and a similar case retriever that searches to retrieve case data by searching through both case data for the unilateral distribution in the right organ and case data for the unilateral distribution in the left organ, based on the one or more image features extracted by the image feature extractor and image features of images contained in the both case data, when the unilateral distribution identifier identifies that the distribution of the lesion portions is the unilateral distribution, an image feature of an image contained in each of the retrieved case data being similar to at least one of the one or more image features extracted by the image feature extractor, the both case data being included in a case database.