The size/volume of a region occupied by a typical TIB pattern does not usually exceed a few mm 2 /mm 3 . Together with the fact that TIB pattern has a complex shape with varying intensities over discontinues branches (i.e., buds), TIB patterns have intensity characteristics with high variation toward nearby voxels (see Fig. 1 ). In other words, TIB patterns do not constitute sufficiently large homogeneous regions. Thus, TIB patterns are localized only in the vicinity of small homogeneous regions, and their boundaries have high curvatures due to the nature of its complex shape. In the next section, we use these two observations to extract novel characteristic features to detect TIB patterns.