Patent ID: 9547061
Date: 2017-01-17
CPC Classifications: A61B,G01R,G06T

Claim:
1. A medical imaging system, comprising: a workstation including at least one input which receives a selected location in an imaging data set having different contrast for a first and a second contrasted tissue type as a seed in the first contrasted tissue type and a display which displays a diagnostic image delineating a first segmented region of the first tissue type and a second segmented region of the second contrasted tissue type and identified regions which include regions fully enclosed by the first segmented region as a third tissue type; a coarse segmenting processor programmed to perform a first segmenting operation including growing a coarse segmented region of coarse voxels for each contrasted tissue type from the seed location based on a first growing algorithm and a growing fraction for each contrasted tissue type, wherein the seed location for growing the second contrasted tissue type includes the first coarse segmented region and any fully enclosed coarse voxels, and each coarse voxel includes an aggregation of voxels and a maximum and a minimum of the voxel intensities; a fine segmenting processor programmed to perform a second segmenting operation including growing a segmented region of voxels for each contrasted tissue type from the seed location and bounded by the second coarse segmented region based on a second growing algorithm and an adjustable growing fraction for each contrasted tissue type initially set to the growing fraction for the corresponding region, wherein the seed location for growing the second contrasted tissue type includes the first segmented region and any identified regions; and an enclosed tissue identification processor programmed to identify any regions of voxels fully enclosed by the first segmented region as being of the third tissue type; wherein the coarse segmenting processor, the fine segmenting processor, and the enclosed tissue identification processor are implemented by an electronic data processor; and wherein the display is configured to display a user interface that includes a plurality of user selectable controls for selecting and manipulating at least one data set and at least one diagnostic image for the first and second segmenting operations.